


The Limit of the World

by oneinspats



Category: Pirates of the Caribbean (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi, Pre-Canon, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-30
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-03-09 15:32:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 40,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3254966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This takes place well before the series and follows Mercer and Beckett as their lives unfold. Um. This is really just a piece of self indulgence for me, so there you go. Have fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [marzipanotter](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=marzipanotter), [strawberriesandtophats](https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberriesandtophats/gifts).



A siege is, naturally, an expression of confinement and space. There is a sense of  _limit_ and therefore those within and without of that limit. And the spatial reality of the siege is also present for the  _limit_ of the between is a physical reality given its existence by the violent act of understanding and comprehension of those on either side. That is to say, there is a wall and a harbour and a point and an isthmus and all these things lack meaning until they are forced to mean something. They are translated into being by sheer necessity of the human need to create boundaries.

It is 1704 and Gibraltar is under siege. Again. Its reality and presence and physically are deafening. Are painfully real. There is no escape from the basic understanding of  _we are here_ and  _they are there_ and  _how much food do we have._ Perhaps the Brunswick favourite, Leibniz, would be able to say something about the individual, unchanging, untranslatable fact of the siege as a sort of monadic point. Perhaps it could, in its own odd way, fit into the philosophy of optimism and this apparently “best He could have done” approach to the universe. These speculations are irrelevant to the men within and without of that limit that defines the edge of the siege. Yet, the speculations still have meaning which gives them some substance so one can suppose that is all well and good. 

 

- 

 

A man is sketching. He’s drawing the defensive positions of the city as it stands on this early crisp September day. It would be beautiful if they weren’t facing the potential of being slowly starved out.

'I once fought for the French.' He says to a boy standing at his side. The boy is small and missing a few of his teeth. He grins a rat like grin. 'But then, I was young and stupid.'

'Where'd you fight for 'em?'

'New France. Ever been? I can't recommend it. Nasty. Ever had beaver? Can't recommend that either.'

The boy nods along. He is being paid a few pennies for his services as a fetch-and-carry lad and so he figures he can spare a moment to listen to the man ramble. Was he a soldier? The boy, we’ll call him Hans, couldn’t tell. Well, he reasons after a moment, he had to be for there was no one else in the city save a few mad Italians who declared themselves neutral.

'Where are you from?' Hans asks. He chews on his nails. The man continues sketching. Maybe, the boy thinks, I should hedge my bets with the French. The Bourbons are good at things like warfare aren't they? And do they pay well? Better than the Dutch and the English perhaps?

'England.'

'London?'

'No.' The notebook closes and the man peers down at Hans. The boy receives a distinct impression of being watched by a hawk. It's not pleasant. He scuffs his toe in the dirt on the wall. They are standing atop the defences and staring out to wide open sea. One side, ancient Mediterranean which is filled with legends and lore and monsters and maidens. The other side, unknown Atlantic which is cold and deep and dark which has storms that rage against the human shores and human ships. 'I'm from the north. A town, you wouldn't have heard of it.'

'Might have done.'

'Manchester. Lots of Flemish up there,' the man pauses, shrugs. 'Least there was when I was a boy.'

'Flemish are all sodding sheep fuckers.'

A laugh, sharp and sudden. Yes well, the man says, then they join the ranks of the Welsh, Yorkshire-men, and the Scottish. Hans doesn’t know what a Yorkshire-man is. He asks and is informed that a Yorkshire-man is a sodding sheep fucker. He can’t argue with that.

 

Sieges never go smoothly. We will again wander along the sandy, uncertain shores of spatial reality for those within our city. Gibraltar, the town of, sits precariously on the western side of the peninsula. This peninsula is connected to Spain-proper by a narrow isthmus. It’s sandy. Difficult terrain for a heavy, tired army to tackle. North of the famous Rock is a sheer cliff which affords the town some protection save for a small, narrow strip. This strip, since the occupation by the Anglo-Dutch army has been made even more narrow as it was partially flooded forcing any land attack to come along that line, in as close to single file as a continental army will go, or to proceed along the shoreline. Also narrow.

Is there a sense here of things becoming compressed, desperate? Perhaps. Canons and batteries were built or reformed as needed in areas best suited for reigning down fire and death onto incoming enemy combatants. But is war this simple? Is war merely an understanding of geography? Hardly. Most things relating to humans are violent and penetrative and entirely surreal and perhaps even marginally absurd.

So the English are in a moment of great discontent. The man with the sketchbook descends from the battery wall and picks his way through the city to a tavern that has something resembling food. He orders soup and bread. He assumes that this can be managed for the moment, before winter and war truly set in. August was a heady month and saw a little bit of action but now September is here and the men’s faces are becoming severe.

'Shoulda been able to go with Rooke, you know.'

Hans and the man sit down at a table. The other men are grumbling over this. Rooke, with his fleet, did a little skirmish with the French that was neither here nor there then left. Hans happily gums with his remaining teeth on half the bread. The man, whose name the boy has yet to acquire, moodily stares at the mariners.

'Shoulda been able to go off with them, stands to reason. We being good English mariners o' course. Instead we're stuck here with mad Dutchmen and filthy Germans and sell-swords. Sides, what do we care for the king of Spain? What does it matter to us who is sodding in charge of this Christ fucking country?'

The other men make noises of agreement.

'Course, now we got a damn Papist in charge.' Cheers of “hear hear” are made.

The rebellious talk continues. Something about goddamn popery practiced by godless papists. Something about Hesse, the man truly in charge of the siege, not doing his office. More about Nugent, the evil Catholic, and poor Foxe who has to put up with him.

The man lets Hans finish his soup as he stands. His notebook is out once they are in the streets and he is jotting notes.

'What're you writing?'

'Words.' The book closes again. 'Just words.'

Hans wants to ask more. The man glares at him so he doesn’t. He follows along and thinks about the stories he’ll tell his brothers if he ever makes it home.

 

- 

 

Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt, called Hesse by his men: “Foxe cannot abide anything that is not his decision. I tell him he cannot leave for England, he throws a fit. I tell him Nugent is governor of Gibraltar, he throws another fit. I tell everyone, Sit down, Calm down, and they all simultaneously throw fits. How can I wage a war with children at my beck and call? There is confusion everywhere. Orders are not carried out, and the officers are the first to make trouble.”

 

Hesse looks up as that dratted Englishman is let in.

'How'd you get yourself past my security?'

A shrug. A book is placed on the desk.

'You wanted to know what the men were saying and how things in the city were looking.'

The prince opens the salty leather cover cautiously, finds a dog eared page, reads it over.

'Well, it is war.' It's closed again. 'Look, Mr ah…'

'Mercer.'

'Mr Mercer, right, what I really need is for Foxe and Nugent to not be ripping each other's throats out like trained cockerels.'

'They were the same on the Irish campaign.'

Hesse blinks, Good lord, poor William. And now what? They’re still at each other. One would have thought…Well, I suppose England hasn’t had an easy time of it lately. Bad run with kings and all. Do you know them?

'The kings? No.'

'Foxe and Nugent.'

'I served under Nugent's command for a short while.'

'Did you by God? Not a papist are you? Don't tell me. Look, I'm busy at the moment, deciding how best to deal with the French and Spanish. We're out numbered you see. I can hold the city fine. But it's not those outside that I'm worried about.'

'Of course.'

'You understand? Good. Good. We're early days yet but once the Spanish and French dig in for the winter we're in for a bit of rough show of it.' The prince opens the book again, looks at the batteries mapped out, the ships, the points of possibly entry, then turning the page there are faces of soldiers and sailors and one of Rooke's fleet and another little sketch of a dog shitting in an alley way. 'You wouldn't happen to speak Spanish would you?'

The man called Mercer shrugs. Hesse isn’t sure how to take this.

'I need a man to ah…to ah watch things for me. Regarding the Spanish. When they dig in.'

'A spy.'

Hesse smiles. Mercer stares at him. Unblinking. The notebook is handed back. At the door Mercer hears the prince say, Come back when the Spanish arrive. I’ll have a job for you.

Outside the door Hans is wiggling from foot to foot.

'You got lice in your breeches?'

'No, just gotta piss like a racehorse.'

Mercer sighs, the boy darts off as soon as they are outside.

 

-

 

Evening light when both the year and the day are dying remind Mercer of home. Of the thin grey line of morning in December when the sun manages to shine on the market town of Manchester. He had heard that Defoe had deigned to call Manchester “the greatest mere village in England”. Or something along those lines. Like the men below, quarrelling in the taverns, itching for a fight, waiting for the next step, his childhood town couldn’t decide which side of anything it was on. This resulted in his father taking the family to hear Henry Newcombe preach but then swearing that the Tories at the collegiate church were the only ones worth listening to. His father had fought on the side of the parliamentarians but then welcomed back the monarchy with open arms. When his boy had made to point out the contradictory nature in all of this old Thomas Mercer, who never liked thinking much beyond what was popular, had responded with a fist on the side of the head and a lecture on the boy minding his own business and not getting caught up in things he didn’t understand.

Somewhere below him, he is sitting on a rooftop, a man begins to sing. It’s a French war song about a lover who goes off to fight and it killed along the way. The woman never finds out. She dies still waiting for him, her ghost shadowing the road he was to take home. A lingering scent of lilac where she once was.

Hans, a few nights later, asks what it’s like to be able to read.

'I never managed it,' the boy explains. 'I can't get anything in order.'

Mercer is half-reading, half staring out the window. The book in hand is something by John Ray, naturalist and philosopher.

'How do you mean?'

Hans shrugs. He says that the words scramble themselves up in front of his eyes. The same for writing. ‘I’ll be given a word but I can’t make it the same way. My name, even, I can’t do it properly.’

A page is turned. John Ray, Mercer thinks, must be quite old now. In his seventies. He would have something to say about this. The boy is watching him not read but turn pages.

'My father couldn't read.' Mercer says at last. 'There's no shame in it.'

'How'd you learn?'

'A radical preacher. When he wasn't busy denouncing the government and the church of England, that is.'

What was his name? Hans wants to know. Hans, Mercer is learning, likes to hear about England. The boy thinks maybe one day he will go there, maybe London, maybe Liverpool, maybe even Manchester despite the Flemish population. He will make his fortune there. Mercer says there are nicer places to make one’s fortune. London is a cesspool. An open sewer at the best of times. Liverpool is full of Liverpudlians. Manchester is all right. If you like that sort of thing. And what is in the rest of the country? Farmers with no land, labourers with no labour. Everyone having too many children and all and sundry flocking to the cities as if the answer to their problems was there. London, he explained one night, has these old walls. From the Medieval time, probably even from the Roman time. Maybe. We did use much of what the Romans left to build our houses. Regardless, what is London now? A sprawling, grasping beast of a city that stretches into slum-ridden countryside. There was a fire there, the year I was born, and it burned down maybe a third of the city maybe a quarter. It was so hot pottery melted. Do you know about the different kinds of fire? The boy had not known.

The radical preacher was Henry Newcombe. ‘He was in and out of the town, you see. From Chester, I think. Or maybe his wife had been from Chester. I can’t remember. He rounded a few of us up and taught us our letters and numbers.’

Did you not have a school? Hans explains that Amsterdam, where he is from, has a school. Though he did not go.

'Grammar school, yes. And a library, relatively new when I was your age. But I had to help my father in fields and later…well there wasn't any time, later on. Until Newcomb made us make time. He had a stick and would herd us like sheep.'

Hans laughs at the image of this man with his scarred face and his rough hewn features being herded by a reverend. Other toe-headed children were included, making complaints as sheep and cows do when forced to move. Pawing the firm earth with bare feet.

Ray’s book is re-opened and Mercer turns a few pages back. He resumes, pauses for a moment, You would like him, he says to Hans. He has a book on the low countries. About your plants.

Aren’t they the same as plants everywhere?

The boy receives a look. I’m paying you to be my eyes and ears, I hope your skills of observation are keener than that.

'Sorry, sir, city lad and all. A tree's a tree.'

'Learn to read. You want to make your fortune? That's the only way to it. There was a period in England, under Henry VIII, when men of low station could rise to be earls. Granted, sometimes their heads were loosened from their shoulders, but I think the moral of self determination is there.'

'Oh?'

'We all bleed the same colour is what I mean.'

Hans thinks, later as he slips out into the streets to be eyes and ears and the silent net catching nighttime secrets for this man who does not officially serve anyone let alone the Prince George, he thinks – I do believe this Mr Mercer knows. The colour of the blood of the rich and the poor. I believe he has seen it both and it has not phased him.

 

-

 

In England, that mercantilist of nations, what is a ship? A ship is its own village, its own separate space where time and existence appear suspended independent from the world outside of its creaking timbre walls and its noisome fervour.

Follow our infamous Rooke and his fleet from Gibraltar back to England. Follow them through raucous waves and treacherous channel until they reach the safety of their country. London, Thames bisected, is thronging. London in 1704 cannot contain itself. It is overflowing, pulsating. In September only the poor and the merchants are left in the city. Gentlemen have retreated to the countryside for sport. The East India Company offices on Leadenhall are buzzing, however.

A young man sits by a window looking down at the passing citizens on their way to or from the market.

'This building is going to fall down around us.' He says to the room behind him. There are cracks in plaster quickly covered over. There is a foundation problem. He went into the basements on his first week at the Offices and reported back to his father that it was a problem. A severe problem.

'There's talk of doing some work on it.'

Our young man turns around, frowning. He ought to be bewigged but it is September and all his friends from university are not in the city. Instead, he is the victim of old Company lords and his father.

'It's a tear down job. Look, there's a leak in my office father -'

'Yes, well.'

'It drips on my papers. Even when it's not raining. I don't want to know where the water, if it is water, is coming from.'

'Move your papers.'

'I do. Then another leak appears. As if by magic.'

'Poor you, Cutler. You suffer overmuch.' His father turns back to the paper in his hand. The morning gazette with its latest parliament scandals and news from the continent.

'How's the war going?'

'Oh you know, it goes.'

A knock on the door, ‘Mr Beckett?’ Two heads look over at the intruder. ‘The senior Mr Beckett.’ The younger, Cutler, sighs and stalks off to a corner, grabs a book from a shelf, and settles down.

Not long before this there was a blind poet who wrote of a civil war on the scale of heavenly bodies and celestial beings. Cutler Beckett’s father had sighed over the mention of the poem when his son had come home from university smartly retorting any comment to him with lines from Satan. But then, his father had been born when the civil war had begun and so perhaps took Milton’s prose more to heart than his son.

'You were born in a summery year,' his mother had said. She with her fragile, Percy beauty. His father with his sure, steady merchant blood.

And his sister? Eight years his senior? A winter month, a winter year. The day she was born two skeletons were found buried in the Tower of London. His father had held his tiny, infant daughter and had whispered, We will name you Elizabeth. May your fortunes be brighter than those of Lady Woodville.

Sitting in the corner with his book and his “I’m not listening” expression Beckett hums ‘our state cannot be severed, we are one, one flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself.’ His father wears a dower expression, ‘I thought I told you to leave off the poetry after graduation.’

'Well I've not else to do today.'

The clerk who had interrupted them looks worried.

Senior Beckett turns full ‘round and looks over his spectacles at his son.

'You can't think of a single thing you ought to be doing?'

'As you say, father.'

'We have a war on. A siege we're supporting. I'm sure there is  _something_ you can be doing.’

Huffing the young man gathers himself up and makes for the door. He turns, sharp on his heels, sneers, ‘would something more classical and less poetic have been to your taste, father? Aedificare diu cogitare oportet. Conserere cogitare non oportet, sed facere oportet.’

The elder Beckett points his quill at the door, jabbing it sharply in the air, ink splatters, hits the desk, stains the wood.

‘ _Out.’_

The younger Beckett turns back to the door, leaves it open, swishes down the hall.

 

\--


	2. Chapter 2

And who is he? Mercer has faced the question before, although he is not a man to suffer overmuch from existential worries.

His reply, I am who I need to be at this precise moment. My understanding of the situation will alter, necessarily, what I am to myself and to others.

Yet, naturally, he finds a sliver of steadiness remaining. This steadiness, one would argue, is the answer to the aforementioned question. But, Mercer thinks, that is too simple a solution for that steadiness of personality and initial reaction is built from experience.

'It is  _fact_ concerning my initial thoughts. Yet, I am not always those thoughts. There is little said here to my second and third thoughts and I find those the more important ones.’

 

-

 

Down by the docks he sketches an image of a monkey. Its pink, little paws grasp at an orange slice. Wrinkled eyes crease further as its mouth opens to devour the fruit. It wears a little blue and red vest with stars upon it.

'How much to get a letter to England?' He asks the man who is officially the un-official harbour master. The thought occurs that the likelihood of getting a letter out of the city is within the vacinity of No. But, still, one must try and he feels this would be a man who would know. Who would have priced everything by inch and is someone to be friendly with.

'So much it ain't happening.'

The letter is pocketed. He thinks he will send it when he leaves, then. This siege will last months. Mercer isn’t sure how much he has patience for.

 

-

 

'Do you miss England?' Hans has been asking him this as October rears its ugly hydra head and the Spanish armies dig in. They are outside the walls. The Dutch and English armies fart in their direction. There is a Scotsman called McKilney who raises his kilt to them each morning in what he calls a true Highland fashion.

'I miss speaking English.' A pause. 'I find I'm reading it with a Dutch accent, now.'

'Can you do that truly?'

'I wouldn't have said so if I couldn't.'

But what was left for him in England? The dead, with their grasping, sucking hands. Even worse, the living. His sisters and all their ever-needy children. A daughter who reminds him of her mother. The letter is for her and has her pretty name, Lisette-Marie Mercer, scrawled across the front. Her mother had been Henriette. Just Henriette. Why didn’t she have a surname? Mercer had asked when they had first met. She didn’t care to have the name of any man let alone her former master. So, he freed her? No. She had freed herself. His daughter is nine, now. Her mother is one of those shades haunting England’s shores.

Sometimes he dreams of Haiti. The Haiti Henriette had told him of with the harsh sun and the pain but the breeze had sometimes been kind. She could paint pictures with words in a way that he never could, melting seamlessly between French and English and the language of her childhood. When he wakes he reminds himself that it is not the dead who chase the living but rather the other way around.

Hans asks, Do you miss England?

Mercer isn’t sure. He has been inhaling foreign languages, air, and sense of self for so long he isn’t firm on what he misses. In truth, he doesn’t think on it much. When he does words and images and people stutter through his mind, saturate it, steal it from himself.

Newcombe, years and years ago, had been translating a text out of Greek into English. Mercer had been beside him, just a lad of twelve, copying out the first chapter of Genesis. Newcombe said, I have known translators who have lost their personality, their originality. Their ability to create their own works, use their own words, goes dry. Do not become too knocked about with language to the point that you lose belief in your own identity. Plotinus quite literally submerged himself but he had been drowning long before.

Do you miss England?

That isle of water. When the Romans had arrived it had been marshland. Sucking, seeping water. It undermined the temples and roads and industry of that empire. It was foreign water, to them. Cold, forbidding. Once, a mad emperor had stood upon the shores and urged his men to make war against Poseidon. To collect sea shells as booty, as tribute. The tribes to the north painted themselves blue, like the water, like the sky. Good Roman soldiers had lost themselves into that unknown, cloudy north, and all that remained of them was a no longer golden eagle.

Do you miss England?

Do you know what it is to drown?

 

-

 

Of course, it is possible to drown without water. Blood, wine as happened to the Duke of Clarence, mucous, bile. There are hundreds of the ways for a person to drown. The esteemed men of the Royal Society would have words to say on the subject of drowning. For Mercer, he wonders if perhaps drowning without liquid is not the most elegant way, despite its apparent incongruity. Water is banal. Blood is…different, to be sure, but common. Wine is decadent. It reminds him of fat, double, triple chinned men in coffee houses making bets on the speed of rain drops dripping down window panes. The rest, those manifold of bodily fluids, are all related to disease and that is simply a mess. Also, unpredictable.

Does hanging count as drowning? It is a similar cause of death. The cutting off of breath to the lungs and so the body expires, changes colour, blood settles in fingers and toes as the corpse twists ‘bout in the breeze.

Bloating occurs in a drowned victim. To an almost unimaginable degree, so they are sometimes unrecognizable until their remains have settled then a relative can look and can nod and can declare, Yes, that is so-and-so. I can see them now. I can see their face and know it to be theirs.

 

Ten, twelve years ago he had been in the colonies. Up in the cold parts, where it is French and then the other parts where it is French but not quite the French he was used to. He had taken up working with a man called Louis-Yves-Saint-Marc, Yves as Mercer called him, and had spent three years in the woods trapping beaver and deer.

There are silences in the wilderness. As a boy he had grown used to the certain quietness that came from the countryside. He had told Hans he was from Manchester, but not truly. Salford, actually. But who knew what Salford was outside of Lancashire? No one.

The quiet of the northern moors of England, with their windswept rocks and expansive hills, jutting little cliffs, not very high, but still, do not fall off them, was a quiet he knew well. It was nothing like the snow and the dense forest and the aching nothingness of these winters. Sometimes, he would stand perfectly still, his breath in cloudy puffs, and hear nothing. Not even the groaning of trees, the cracking of branches under ice, the shifting of snow under foot. Nothing. It was the sort of quiet that could drive a man insane.

'I met a man maybe four years ago,' Yves told him as they made a fire, huddled around for warmth. It was January and biting. 'His name was Andre de something. He told me that there was a cabin perhaps a days walk north but I ought not to go to it because Michel had been there all winter and now Michel was the devil and not a man anymore.' Yves stared at Mercer. The Frenchman had a grizzled face, wide blue eyes and no eyebrows, a scar down the right side disfiguring him. 'Have you ever met the devil?'

'Not to my knowledge.'

'Pray you never do.'

'You went to this Michel?'

Yves nodded. Yes, because that is what you do. So I went to him. Found him raving in the hut. Naked he was and with bloodied skin. He was tearing at his veins with his teeth. His hair all black save for a white forelock. He reminded me of a wolf without a pack. Drowning in a solitary life.

And what happened to this Michel? This hunter, this woodsman?

Oh, he died. As I said, he tore out his veins with his teeth. Or was going to. Until I shot him. Sometimes murder is mercy. That night I saw the devil by my campfire. He was wearing Michel’s skin but had wolf-eyes and sharp teeth and a rocky, cold laugh.

In Quebec City Mercer asked after this Michel because the community of _coureurs de bois_  was not too large.

Mercer explains, ‘This Michel went mad, I was told. Up near Hudson Bay.’

'You English?'

'Yes.'

'You got a weird accent to your French.'

'Probably.'

'Michel, eh? Oh, yes. You were in the bush with…'

'Yves.'

The man he had asked, Touissant, nodded and looked grim. You’re not too old, no more than five and twenty. Mercer owned this was probably true. Yves has been in the woods for a long time. Sometimes men see things in the woods.

'He said he saw the devil wearing Michel's skin.'

Touissant looked at him for a long time. Clear and steady and then finished his ale.

'Yves has seen things I have no doubt.'

'The devil doesn't just show up wearing anther man's skin.'

'You're English. A protestant, too. You wouldn't understand.'

In the woods no man is Catholic. No man is Protestant. No man is Puritan or Lutheran or Mossleman or Jewish. In the woods there is no God as we know Him only our senses and our gun and our hunting knife and our will to survive. You can drown in the woods. Water, when it freezes expands, the snow and the ice press in around you. Alone, you can drown without water. Alone, you can drown and drown and drown until either you or someone else takes pity and sends you to hell.

 

But. Hanging, this is where we were diverted. Mercer left Quebec City in the early months of 1692 because he was bored with fur trapping and had had enough of the French.

'I used to shoot at you.' He said to Yves as he left.

'Me? I don't think so. I would have remembered.'

'Back home in Europe.'

'A young boy like you? Well, I can't say I'm surprised. Where are you off to?'

'Boston, maybe. Charles town, maybe. It's warmer there.'

Yves laughed, reached under his shirt and pulled out Saint Hubert and undid the chain. Patron saint of hunters. He handed it to Mercer. ‘To remember me by, boy. And to keep you safe.’

From Quebec City the way to the coast takes a man down the Saint Laurence and then into Dutch territory. Mountains, rugged terrain, more forests but it was spring and so the carrying on was not terrible. Yves had asked why he did not take a ship to Halifax and from there to Boston but Mercer said he wasn’t one for ships at the moment.

 

Hanging. There was a village. It was late summer, now. August and Mercer watched as a man was carried in a cart through the streets of this village to the place of execution. A large tree. At this time there is no trap door that will open allowing for a quick breaking of the neck during a hanging. That will not be invented for another twenty or so years. Instead, a rope is tied around a neck and the victim is hauled up, or made to climb up, the ladder. The rope is attached by a hook to the gallows and the person is pushed off and left to strangle until dead. Sometimes, as the case is now, the rope is affixed to the tree branch and so the man is made to climb the ladder and then the executioner will reach about him awkwardly to take the noose and place it about his neck, tighten it, then push.

The condemned man made a pretty speech. The crowd was swayed to his innocence. He was turned off. Hung. A man upon a horse said that sometimes the devil can wear the appearance of an Angel of Light. Do not be fooled by his reverent speech. 

That night Mercer dreamt of a man turning into a wolf and devouring the world whole. He looked into Mercer’s eyes and a single scar began to appear along the man’s face, disfiguring it. When Mercer woke he found his room empty except for the empty shadows cast by the moon.

 

-

 

Mercer tells Hans, I once dreamt of a pale horse and his name that sat on him was Death, and hell followed with him. And power was given unto them, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth. I asked him, What shall I do and where shall we go? And he replied, Those destined for death, to death; those for the sword, to the sword; those for starvation, to starvation; those for captivity, to captivity.

 

-

 

The letter for Lisette-Marie sits on his desk until he tires of looking at it and burns it.

 

-

 

Finally there is a shift. The French arrive and the Spanish are being seen to be taking this siege with seriousness and so Mercer makes his presence known around the offices of the Prince. He thinks he might be needed and so best to be available as much as possible. Hans, ever the eager boy, waits with him. They are in a corner near a window. One of those dainty alcoves where the sun shines in just right through stained glass and if Mercer had been a pretty woman in a pretty dress he would have been a painting.

As it is, he’s an ugly, scarred man in old clothes that have seen too many battles with a battered little pamphlet filled with year old news.

Hans entertains himself with a rope and a stick. Eventually this bores him and he scoots over to the Englishman.

'What are you reading now?'

'An account of the Great Storm.'

Hans looks expectant.

'Last year London witnessed a storm. Very blousy. Lots of rain. Ships wracked and ruined. Several thousand dead. Defoe, apparently experiencing a slow news day, wrote an account of it. Had it printed.'

'Was it so very terrible?'

Mercer shrugs. He wouldn’t know, he hadn’t been there. Where was he? Oh, on the continent. Fighting the Spanish. Or maybe the French. Or maybe the Dutch. Or maybe he had been in Portugal contemplating returning to the New World. Thinking back on the year he realises it had been a busy one.

'The man in the iron mask died shortly before the storm.'

'The who?'

'A man kept locked away by the king of France.'

'Why?'

Another shrug. Wouldn’t know. I’m not the king of France.

'Shortly after old Newton was made president of the Royal Society. What does this signify? Nothing, I suppose. Nothing, really. A man dies, a storm, another promoted.'

'What's the Royal Society?'

'A collection of men who spend too much time and money in penny universities doing science. Or talking about doing science. They drink a lot. Eat a lot, too. Do you know Robert Boyle?'

The boy shakes his head.

'He was president for a while. Did some fancy stuff with gas pressure and air pumps.'

Hans thinks about this. The boy is convinced that the man in front of him is something more than he appears. How else would he be on personal speaking terms with the Prince of Hesse? How else would he know these gentlemen of consequence? Air pumps! Hans is mystified.

Finally he asks who Newton is.

He is told that he is a man who does math. In an argument with someone maybe? Mercer isn’t sure. He hears whispers of it but doesn’t think the goings on of gentlemen of leisure are of much interest to him unless the goings on involve him getting paid.

No, no, Hans exclaims, that hardly tells me anything. He is a man of some standing, surely.

Mercer supposes he is. He’s a Miss Molly with a turn of economy. Master of the coin, which means he keeps our currency in check so vagabonds like myself can’t clip coins for a living. Newton probably gets up to no good with half the gentlemen scientists in the society.

To this Hans has nothing to say so he returns to his stick and rope. The afternoon sun leaves pretty little patterns on the stone. He hops from one foot to another. Mercer tosses his pamphlet onto the bench, looks out the window, watches two soldiers brawl, wonders how long it will be until everything cracks.

 

-

 

Prince George to Mercer, What are the French up to?

Mercer to Prince George, It’s a landing party. Some three thousand men to be supplied. The fleet will leave soon enough, though.

How many are under Valladarias’ command?

Mercer estimates seven to eight thousand, including the fresh three thousand supplied by the French. No more.

Plus the French navy.

Right, plus them. For now. Look, Mercer hums, I heard something about them leaving. About maybe only five or six ships remaining. Enough to cause grief I don’t doubt.

You know this how?

Oh, you know.

Prince George doesn’t. Know that is. One of his other sets of eyes and ears, a young Bavarian man whose name is apparently Charles (but this doesn’t sound convincing to Hesse) is cautious of Mercer.

Charles came to him a week before. Your Englishman is uncouth. He pours himself and the Prince a glass of wine.

'Oh?'

'He ripped the fingernails off a Frenchman the other day. Clean off. Without a blink. Said he would do the other hand next. Said he knew how to cut a man up into pieces really slowly.' Charles blinked, then, owlishly. He had red hair. Hesse thought all red haired men looked bilious.

'Your Englishman  _laughed_  while he said these things. Sort of. He doesn’t laugh, actually. He just makes this noise that is something like a laugh. Do you know he’s positively feral?’

'This is war,' Prince George replied.

'Sure,' the informant said. 'But we're still gentlemen I hope. Not feral cats playing with a wounded sparrow.'

Hesse sends Mercer away. We will deal with the French when we need to. But you know how sieges are. All this idle waiting, and then this sudden new arrival of fresh enemy soldiers, I need you to keep an ear to the ground within the citadel. Leave outside of it to Charles.

'Of course…What am I exactly looking for?'

'Treason. Unrest. Anything that might compromise our position.'

Mercer nods. Hesse dismisses him then calls him back.

'Maybe keep the fingernail ripping to a minimum?'

'What fingernail ripping.'

'Oh, nothing.' 

Mercer to Hans, once they are both outside, I hate Bavarians. 

Hans replies, Oh, everyone hates Bavarians. Even Bavarians hate Bavarians. It’s a well known fact. 


	3. Chapter 3

John Locke is dying. John Locke has been dying for two weeks. Does he know? If so, he does not say. He instead turns to Sir Francis Masham and his wife Damaris and instructs them on Dryden and they speculate on Newton’s new work. They have heard that the mad scientist has put bodkins in his eye. Locke laughs at the image. Imagine, he smiles over port, stoic, sturdy, angry Newton jabbing pins around his required body parts of ocular existence.

If the mind is blank. A  _tabula rasa_ as the philosopher would have it, when we are born, does it return to this state as we die? Do images and thoughts and dreams drift away?

-

 

Lady Masham writes to William Beckett, old family friend,  _John is fading. Francis does not see it. Or will not let himself see it. But he is fading. I dread this house with John no longer in it. No longer with us to make us laugh, to inspire us to better things than we are, to tease with me. His hands are parchment. You know the language of old men, how it is all the same, he is speaking it now and every syllable breaks my heart._

_Will, do you remember when your own father died? How you did not weep but held his cold hand in yours then turned from the death bed and said that it was over. You did not weep. You were dry eyed and your little boy was no more than four and did not understand so you took him outside because children should not breath in the air of the dead and dying._

_I fear I will not be as strong as you. Come to us. Come to Essex, come up to our little High Laver with our little church and little people. Dear god I fear I will be lost without you, Will._

_Margaret told me that you cried when you went to the opera a month later because it was your father’s favourite. How is it that music speaks to the soul even when solid, no longer breathing flesh cannot?_

_I do not think my chest would be able to bare the crushing weight of John’s death. I will not be able to breath. I will not be able to see. I will not be able to speak. I will be frozen. My mind will know nothing. I will be as I was born, empty headed, but not innocent. No longer innocent. Never innocent. I have seen too much to ever be innocent again._

_Will, I wish to see you and your not-so-little-boy more than I can say. Remember when we were young and playing in the fields of Cambridge with Clarke and I said to you that I knew, of all the people in the world, I could rely on you the surest? And you said, “sweet Damaris, call me and I will be there”. I am calling you Will. I am calling you with everything in my soul, the fibre of my being because I do not think I will be able to believe in God and Love or anything at all when he finally dies and I know that you will understand and you will say nothing and you will just take my hand and later you will tell me that is over then we will go into the sun and I will be able to breath._

_Come._   
  


_Yours ever, truly,_

_Damaris C. Masham_

 

-

 

William Beckett to his son, Cutler, we are going to Essex.

Cutler Beckett to his father, Good lord,  _why_? It’s October.

William Beckett to his son, Damaris Masham wants us there. John Locke is dying.

Cutler Beckett thinks that Locke is a dirty whig, aloud he says, Good lord, truly? I can be ready to leave in an hour.

 

-

 

Cutler is holding  _Two Treatises_ in his lap as the carriage pulls out of the last of the suburban slums of London into the countryside proper. They are heading east through succulent land, although no longer green as fall is present and full and strong.

‘I don’t see why we have to go all the way to High Laver because Lady Masham wrote you a letter.’ Beckett the younger declares. He is looking out the window and wishing for the comforts of home.

‘We’re old friends, Cutler.’

‘That means little to me.’

William fixes his son with a steady gaze. The young man finally meets it. They continue the unspoken exchange for another minute, then another before Cutler breaks it and returns to the window. The ground under his feet is shaking. He is only dimly aware of how the company works, only dimly aware of how power is a web through the land tied off in counting houses across Europe and the wide expanse of empty ocean that separates him from the factories of Surat and Bombay.

England is a nation but it is also an idea. It is something to achieve, to create and reshape and form to fit your own needs. Cutler, staring out the window at damp countryside, does not think he wants England or anything in particular. Work is distasteful. He despises it. His father, ever dedicated to the ledger and the debit-credit columns that line the inner workings of his mind, is deplorable. The elder Beckett does not drink, does not gamble, does not ride, does not shoot, does not go to Bath or anything else a gentleman ought to do.

 

-

 

In Italy, only a year or so ago, Cutler had met another young man named Thomas Adder who informed him that he knew all about Cutler’s father, the low brow merchant with no title, and did not think anyone in the family deserving of the honour of being known as a gentleman.

He spent the rest of his time in Rome being cut by the English  _emigres._ He traveled forward, north, through twisting cold roads of the alps eventually landing in warm France. Beside a nameless stream on a nameless country road he picked up a dandelion and crushed it in his palm, let the seeds fly through the air broken and bent.

 

-

 

‘Have you met Locke?’ Cutler asks.

William shakes his head, tilts it then, purses his lips. He is a wide faced man with a square jaw very unlike the round oval shape of his son. ‘Once. I was in the Netherlands on business with the Dutch company and met with Queen Mary. Locke was in her entourage and we conversed briefly. I thought him intelligent but not…not kind. No,’ his voice drifts off. ‘I would not say I thought him kind.’

‘And Lady Masham?’

‘What of her?’

‘Does she think Locke kind?’

William smiles. Reaches forward and plucks  _Two Treatises_ out of Cutler’s lap. Perhaps, he murmurs. He is thumbing the pages, he is reading a scant line here, a scant line there. Perhaps she does. She thinks him a worthy man, and coming from Damaris that is a compliment.

Why? She is just a woman.

Oh, and what a woman she is. Did you know she — well, better leave that off. She wouldn’t hold with such knowledge being bandied about.

What knowledge?

Never you mind. Tell me, how are you finding your footing at the company? Or does my dear son still have sea legs?

 

-

 

To the young man in the carriage there is nothing for him in Essex. A dying old man, a great thinker perhaps, but yet – he feels no need to meet him. He feels no need to hold the hands of the one who penned such critiques, such massive thoughts on government.

When he had been at Oxford he and his friend George Stanhope had read Locke’s early works with dramatically loud voices. They had climbed atop library tables and turned  _Human Understanding_ into a sermon, they made  _Two Treatises_ an angry diatribe. Which, now, Cutler supposes it sort of is. Not to be outdone a few other boys had climbed up beside them and admonished them in the words of the Bard.  _Leviathan_ rose from the depths. Pot bellied Edward Andrews held Hobbes’ work before him and made the window panes tremble. This had gone on until one of the masters of philosophy had come in and dragged out Cutler and George by their ears. Following them were the other boys. They were provided with a stern lecture and given cleaning duties for the remainder of the month; Beckett excepted due to a sickly constitution.

What did Cutler have to do as repentance for disrupting the sacred space of the library of Christ’s College? He wrote a paper about the importance of government and laws and the unspoken treaty all enter into upon being born into society.

 

-

 

Life, Beckett thinks, is in the city. It is not in these small country villages, with these small country people and their small country minds. It is in the bustle of crowds, the heat and compression of coffee houses, the crowded balls, warm and inviting clubs. If he was in London now he would be having a drink with Stanhope and they’d be reminiscing about their tour and maybe they’d go looking for ladies later. Or, Stanhope would insist they scratch an itch and Beckett would allow himself to be carried along out of friendship and kinship.

As it happens, upon their arrival to High Laver there is a letter for Cutler from George. His father gives him a pointed look before he absconds to his rooms.

‘Mind your manners.’

‘I am minding them a plenty father.’

‘I will tolerate your snippiness in private but not here. Not in Damaris’ house, not in the presence of Sir Francis (to whom you owed your position in Oxford, I might add), and certainly not in front of Locke.’

‘Good lord you’d think he was Jesus Christ on the cross for the way we’re all simpering about.’

William Beckett grabs his son’s shoulder, a tight merchant-sailor’s grip, Cutler’s eyes go wide.

‘You are my son, god help me, but I do not know where and when you become such a  _lordling._ '

They part ways.

 

-

 

George Stanhope to Cutler Beckett:

_You are missing a lark, now that your father has taken you to the country. And such a queer time of year to be there I shouldn’t think._

_Well, here’s the thing. I have gone to bed with Miss Haywood and she was a riot. Let me tell you how it all occurred. We were at the public dance and she was wearing a red dress with little roses in her hair. I was with Ellis and Williams and little Sprat whom you hate. We were as gay as anything having just left the club with some cheery winnings at the tables. Ellis is the devil with dice you know. So, off to the dance we go because there is not else to do in mid October. There, across the overly crowded room was Miss Haywood looking stunning. I say to Ellis, ‘lor’ man, I’ve got a bet with Cutler on her. I’m going to make my winnings tonight’ and Ellis laughs and says, ‘cheers to you, sir, for she’s as closed as a virginal nun’._

_Never a man to be deterred by such sayings I struck off across the room to her side. We meet each other cordially, with her dark eyes making sweet looks at me over her fan. After a minute or two of conversation I manage to engage her for a dance and we make a pretty thing of it. Then she dances the next set with Williams and the set after that with Sprat who steps on her toes. After Sprat she comes over, flushed and with punch, and declares that the next dance is the last one she will dance this evening so I immediately snatch her hand from her (heaving) bosom and declare that I must have it or I shall be driven to distraction._

_Her, ‘Do all men make love in such a queer fashion?’_

_Me, ‘Only men truly in love.’_

_Her, ‘Well, our fingers shall kiss then but not else for I mind myself carefully. You, sir, should take a lesson in that.’_

_Me, ‘I will hold that my fingers are the most sacred part of my body then. Miss Haywood I declare that I love you madly and devoutly. What do you wish from me? I will fetch you the moon and a necklace of stars.’_

_Cutler, I can hear you rolling your eyes all the way from Essex at this point. Never mind that you are not a man for romance, I am and shall always be._

_She giggles then and I lead her onto the floor. We dance and oh what a dance it was. Now, it is three in the morning and the event will easily last another two hours so I say to her, ‘it is getting warm in here. Shall we not take the air?’_

_She agrees. We go to the gardens and there I tell her of my love and adoration for her. I_ respect  _her and_ admire  _her and so on. I think I quoted old Shakespeare. Or maybe it was someone else. Regardless, after such persuasions and promises she yields herself to me and we have a great time of it. When I left she gave me her hand and as I kissed it I found her pressing a favour into my palm._

_So, all of this written and known – you can appeal to Williams and Ellis for the truth of it – you owe me ten guineas as I got her into bed before All Saints._

_While you are in Essex do keep me abrest of all that occurs in High Laver. Tell me of any games or gaffs or plots you get yourself into. And if the country is truly dry, as I suspect such a place might be, at least tell me of the rides you go on and if you bag any birds. Surely you will go shooting, dying man or no. Your father does get his feathers all fluttered over some philosopher. If I had a shilling for every thinker around I’d be a richer man than I already am._

_When you return to London you must get me a job at the Company. Father has threatened to cut me off yet again and I feel that perhaps if I made a fortune in my own right I wouldn’t be half so frightened of him. That your father went from merchant-sailor to foremost man in London gives me heart that this investing and merchant-ing is the right way to go about it. We will have drinks with your old man and it will be a done deal. He won’t regret it. I’ve a head for figures which automatically makes me more useful than half the idiots you’ve told me of._

_Plus, I feel that since Boyle and certain others of great renown have partaken of such adventures that it is worthy of gentlemen. I mean, it is the Honourable East India Company so there you go. We will have a lark of it, being company men together. It’ll be like the old days back at Oxford only with fewer gaffs._

_Yours in friendship always,_

_G. Stanhope_

-

 

Cutler meets Locke as the older gentleman is retiring to bed. It is only eight in the evening and the rest of the household is awake but the philosopher tires quickly and cannot abide the energies of those more alive than him for long. He slips, like a shade, from the library into the hall. He is thin. He is fading. His hair is wisps and his skin so pale the veins run stark, sky blue beneath it. The old man smiles at the young one.

‘You’re young Master Beckett.’ Cutler bows, takes his hat off. Locke is in robes, dressing gown, a night cap on his head. Beckett had many imaginings of what the man might look like. Doddering corpse was not one of them. ‘Damaris said you would be here with your father.’

‘Lady Masham and my father grew up together.’

‘I know.’ Locke leans into the door. He is considering the young man in front of him who is wigless but has a line of powder on his forehead and short black hair which is curly and a round face tending towards plump. Thin lips. Cold eyes. Locke sighs. ‘Your mother did not wish to make the journey?’

‘My mother rarely leaves our estate, sir. In Oxfordshire. She cannot abide the City. Traveling does not suit her.’

‘She must miss you and your father terribly.’

‘Must she? I suppose she must. There are so few people there.’

‘But then some like the solitude of the countryside.’

It feels as if there are ghosts around them. And perhaps there are. Hungry spirits with tendrils wrapping around the hearts and minds of the living. Beckett thinks, the dead do not chase the living.

Locke reaches out his hand, it is a heavy weight, a cold spider with dry limbs touching Beckett’s too warm, too living palm and fingers.

‘Help me to my room, my lad. I grow tired.’

Swallowing annoyance Beckett takes Locke in hand and together they edge down the hall way into a wing with eastward facing windows that catch the morning sun. Now, however, it is dim and dark. Leaving Locke in a chair by the fire Beckett lights a few candles, turns down the bed as he has seen servants do.

‘Shall I ring for someone?’

Locke shakes his head. He is looking into the flames. He is remembering something. Turning, lifting his hand so Beckett lingers by the door Locke murmurs, ‘I was in London for the burning of the Great Fire. I was visiting Lord Cooper in Exeter House but normally I was in Oxford. Where your family is from.’

‘Just my mother’s family, sir.’

‘That is still your family. Do you know how hot the fire was? It melted pottery. Men who were caught in it, well, they found nothing of their bones. Just whispered traces that once a human had been there. Once a person had breathed the air we breath and drank in the warmth of the sun that we bathe in and wished for the same wishes we all wish for.’

Leaving the rooms Beckett shivers, rubs hands over his forearms. He scowls at Locke’s door and wishes the old man were dead already so he could go back to London and wouldn’t have to help doddering fools to bed and listen to their mumblings.

‘Locke was in London during the Fire.’ He tells his father as they drink brandy in a crisp autumn night air.

‘Was he? I could have sworn he was in Oxford when it happened. Cooper didn’t have him to London until ‘67.’

‘That’s what he said.’

William looks over at his son with those careful Percy features which are so pretty on his wife yet so haughty on their child.

‘You were speaking with him?’

‘I helped him to his room.’

‘That was good of you, Cutler.’

The younger man finishes his brandy, nods to his father, says he is going in to write letters then to bed. It is late and he wishes to be up early. William’s eyebrows raise.

‘Well,’ Cutler glares. ‘Just because you do not see me downstairs before eleven doesn’t mean I’m not up.’

 

-

 

That night Beckett lingers on a collection of cavalier poetry. He thinks it trashy but all his friends enjoy it so he reads it for their sakes. Also, sometimes, it is nice to read them in the evening when he is alone and can shift the bed sheets and his nightgown just so and there isn’t a trace of emissions the next morning for staff to find. He is careful, if nothing else.

George had once offered him a French collection. It had men and women in lewd positions, usually in the countryside or a whorehouse. One or two had been bath houses and even fewer had been in churches. They had been twenty at finishing up at Oxford and wishing to see the world outside the confining boundaries of England. Beckett had taken the French collection to bed with him and thumbed through them. He found the women nice enough, as was his wont, but the men he lingered on a little longer. The next morning he returned the book.

‘I’ll pick up one of my own,’ he told George.

‘See that you do. They’re jolly good. Here, here I’ll write the name of the publisher. It’s on —- street in London. Ask for Carlisle.’

He hadn’t gone. He couldn’t say why. Perhaps it was the lingering Puritan upbringing of his mother with her northern Calvinist family. The dirtiness of the pamphlets felt common to him. Low brow. But, sometimes he reads Ovid and Catullus and Tibullus and Plato and Xenophon and imagines Roman and Greek men and then they shift and change to English and French men and then he banished the thoughts because they are unworthy of the gentleman he is trying to be. After such nights he buries the books and pamphlets of these classical works away between Cato’s speeches and Bede’s history of England.

This night he is reading a dirty rag of old Rochester’s poems. It was stuffed within a finer printing of acceptable poems. The candle light flickers over the lines and then George’s crude drawings. Everything, Beckett thinks, I get is second hand. From my lewd poetry to my books to my christening dress when I was a child. Humming a stanza he drifts to sleep, ‘Nor shall our love-fits, Chloris, be forgot, When each the well-looked linkboy strove t’enjoy, And the best kiss was the deciding lot, Whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy.’

 

-

 

Perhaps it is because he has never seen a battle, only read of them, but Cutler cannot imagine why his father is so keen on salt peter. England cannot produce the amount needed to sustain its wartime activities both on the continent as well as in her colonies and so must look abroad for a more sustainable source.

This, William explains, is where our beloved Company comes into the picture. Beginning with the Civil War and up to the present the Company has cornered the market on three essential goods: salt peter, gun powder, and pepper. Without these three things, well without the first two, England would not be the powerful nation she is. This, William’s finger is pressed against a ledger, is what matters. However, things are sticky at the moment. War, broadly. The French, more precisely. The Dutch are neither here nor there. We’re their ally at the moment but let us table that for the time being.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Cutler asks over tea. They are in the library and the quiet of High Laver is beginning to grate on both father and son.

‘I want you to figure out how we are best to route the salt peter and gun powder to our brave troops and intrepid allies in Gibraltar.’ A map is appeared and placed on top of the ledgers. ‘Sticky business because of how narrow the straight is. The French will have concentrated their navy at the opening to the harbour and will be defending the entrance to the straight as well, knowing that after Rooke left we would be sending reinforcements and supplies at some point. Same for the Dutch. So, they’re keen to keep us out. What I need is for us to find a friendly Habsburg Spanish supplier with Dutch and English sympathies and balls larger than Scafell Pike to make a daring run. You, my lad, are going to find me this man, over see the outfitting of the ship, and manage the entire operation.’

Cutler sets the teacup down. He stares at his father for a long moment. William smiles back with a generous grin.

‘No.’ The younger Beckett states.

‘No?’

‘No. Because I don’t see how it is to be done. I don’t think it possible. Besides, didn’t all the English leave with Rooke? We haven’t any of our men there. Let the Dutch sort their own kind out.’

‘Do you understand the definition of “ally”?’

‘Yes. But I also understand the definition of “fool’s errand” which this is.’

William folds up the map. He closes the ledgers. Puts everything in a neat pile in the middle of the desk. Cutler watches without moving. It is the middle of October and the seasons are muddying as they ready themselves to change yet again. Miles away men are realizing that they are going to be in a siege in the middle of winter with scant chance of success let alone survival.

‘You are my only son and heir.’

‘I am.’

‘If you want your inheritance handed to you on a silver platter you can forget it.’ William spreads his hands, he is still smiling. Oh god, Cutler thinks, he isn’t shouting. ‘I am not sure where I went wrong in your upbringing, boy, but something has clearly gone awry. I will make this very clear to you, if you want your inheritance you will do as I say and you will over see this operation. You will do as I say as your father, your superior, and your elder. If you do not you can say farewell to anything you might have received upon my death.’

Outside the sun is shinning.

In a slow movement upwards Cutler stands. He is trying to not shake, he can feel the tension in his neck, the prickling of his palms. There is a detached feeling between his body and his clothes and the room he is in. He wishes he were in London with George trying to find a place to drink and a skirt to lift. He wishes he were still on the Continent traveling from sunny town to sunny town spending too much money and drinking too much and not giving a damned tuppence about a thing. He wishes were were still in Oxford when his father shrugged and said, Well boys will be boys.

‘Mother wouldn’t let you disinherit me.’ It’s a whisper. He wishes it were not. He wishes for so many things right now.

His father snorts. ‘Your mother doesn’t have a say in this. Your mother has never had a say in anything regarding this family and has made it clear she never cared to have one.’

‘You would leave me penniless. A shame to our name-’

‘What name?’

It is too hot in the room. It may be autumn but it is too hot in the room.

‘Our family name.’

‘Which is what? Beckett? It is a trader’s name. A merchant name. You are nothing, Cutler. I am nothing. The only thing that makes us  _something_ is our money. You are not a lord no matter how hard you play pretend at it and so long as you continue to  _waist every_ potential you have you will never  _be_  a lord.’

Their voices have not been raised. Everything is perfectly calm. Between them is a table with a stack of papers in the middle.

‘Do as I ask of you and I may see you made a lord yet. Continue to flit away your time, talent, and money with whores and gambling and I will see you in the docks before I claim you as a son.’

William Beckett leaves.

 

Slowly, slowly, Cutler lowers himself down to the chair. He is sweating. He can feel damp shirt under his arms. He swallows, tightly, his eyes  _are not_ burning.

Well, he whispers to the room, we’ll see how successful this venture will be. Father.


	4. Chapter 4

**London, October 17.**  

Lord Abel receives a missive from Gibraltar. 

_Sir, we are done for if we do not have supplies. We are done for if we do not have men. We are done for if we do not have ships. We are done for. The French are everywhere. We cannot hold._

 

There is a more formal entreaty for aid and men and supplies, naturally, but this more desperate plea is sewn into the jerkin worn by Hesse's messenger. A young Dutch boy who looked something like a bull dog. He hops about at Abel's side as the Admiral tears into the war office.

'I'm setting sail at once.'

A young man is at the desk with Blathwayte, secretary of war. The young man and Blathwayte turned two sets of steady eyes onto Abel.

'Setting sail for where?' Blathwayte asks. There are maps between them. Abel can see Gibraltar and chess pieces representing the French. There is a fleet surrounding the point. The Admiral motions to the map as if to say, You know.

'I've received communications from Hesse. The situation sounds desperate. I think it best we mobilize now. Ideally we would have mobilized two days ago, but there is little to be done for that now. Still, we can get supplies to Admiral Leake in Lisbon and send him forward to Gibraltar.'

The young man is listening and Abel cannot tell if he understands what is being said. Ignoring the boy he focusses on Blathwayte who is leaning back wearing glorious gold-brown and looking handsome and round bellied. He is in a listening mood. Abel leans onto the desk, palms flat. The Dutch boy hands over the formal communication which Blathwayte takes.

'Whoever is writing Hesse's letters has terrible handwriting.' He comments. 'But I suppose they are in the middle of a siege. Well, this looks desperate and I am glad things have worked out so we are all here at once. Mr Beckett this is Lord Richard Abel, Abel this young man is Mr Cutler Beckett of the Honourable East India Company, his father is old William.'

Ah, Abel smiles, he thought there had been something familiar about the flat gaze of the man with his neither here nor there grey-blue eyes. They shake hands.

Abel, 'A pleasure, sir.'

'No it's all mine. I am here on behalf of my father. We are interested in selling the navy our share of saltpetre and gunpowder which has just come in from India.'

Abel sits, takes the glass of wine offered. He motions his new Dutch shadow into a corner. There is a sardonic look on the child's face as he silently interviews the faces of the gentlemen present. Abel isn't sure about this boy who claims to be unable to speak or understand English but seems to be aware of all that passes. Still, if Hesse sent him he must be reliable.

'We need all you have, sir.' Abel says. 'And we'll be thankful for it.' He waits. The young man waits. Blathwayte sighs, closes his eyes. Beckett shifts and produces a small diary. A travelers diary, if Abel was any judge, with simple leather wrapped around it, tied with a string.

'We have seven hundred tons available at the moment.' He turns a page. 'Of saltpetre.'

'How much for a ton?' Blathwayte inquires.

'Hm, will the war office be purchasing the entire lot?'

Blathwayte and Abel exchange a glance. Beckett's eyes have not lifted from the book. The young man continues, 'actually, apologies. Only four hundred is available. We are selling some to merchants heading down to Africa.'

Abel's expression darkens, Blathwayte holds a hand up, a discreete shake of the head.

Blachwayte, 'We'll take all four hundred then. Again, how much per tonnage?'

'At this time, with it being such a risk for our Indiamen to make the journey without mishap, and with it being war time...' finally Beckett glances up, appears to be startled by the intent stares of the two military men in front of him. 'I'll make it an even one hundred fifty a ton.'

Blathwayte breaths out through his teeth. 'I thought we were men of honour in this room.'

Beckett frowns back down at his book, shrugs, he is silent but Abel knows that fluid merchant-man movement of _take it or leave it._

'If I may speak?' Abel is looking at Blathwayte who nods. 'The Office will pay eighty per ton.'

'One twenty.'

'Eighty five.'

Blathwayte, with hands up to the mute Dutch boy in the corner, 'Christ's blood we'll be here all day.'

'One fifteen, and that is really stretching it. This is not an inexpensive item I will have you know.'

Abel scoffs, 'Oh I know. I'm a Navy man, have been since before you were in breeches. I would pay for saltpetre with my own blood.' The young man looks at him expectantly. Oh? Will you? Let me make that a calculation. 'Drop to ninety seven. We're in a war, have you no love for your own countrymen?'

'Not particularly. One hundred. Forgive me, sir, I like even numbers.'

Abel glares, 'ninety eight is even.'

'Round, then. Round numbers. Zeros. Did you know that the ancient Greeks banned the number zero? It was considered heretical.'

Abel looks back at the map. The black chess pieces are the French fleet and they are a floating mass of black in the Mediterranean. Rooke is no longer in Gibraltar. Leake is in lisbon and will take at least a week to arrive. What does Hesse have? A gun boat? A handful of soldiers and artillery? And this artillery, can he even use it? The French will not wait much longer, if that haven't attacked already or are attacking as they speak. God, god, Abel thinks, we need more time. We need more men. We need more gunpowder and guns and why in the seven hells is the fucking East India Company selling to slavers when they should be selling to the Navy? Don't they know a war is on.

Quietly Beckett hums, 'the slavers paid one fifty a ton.' He looks steadily at Abel. 'That is why we sold to them first. I could have sold it all to them but I felt that it might be the right thing to aid our countrymen in war.'

Blathwayte contemplates the crenelation above him. Good Lord, he wants this to be over.

'The Office,' the big man breaths out. 'The Office will pay the one hundred and be done with it. Get the Saltpetre to Abel today and Abel, you get it out to Lisbon as soon as possible. This war isn't going to wait for us to fix favourable prices.'

 

 

Beckett the younger, upon returning to Essex, I got half for one fifty and ton and the other half for one hundred a ton.

Beckett the older, from over the gazette, That high? How did you manage that?

Beckett the younger smiled, I made it sound like we had less than we did. At least to the first buyer.

He walks out before his father can ask, What do you mean the _first_ buyer?

 

 

 

 

**Gibraltar, October 26.**

The bomb ship is burning and the French Navy is pounding the city’s harbour defenses. Mercer curses under his breath, hurdles along the wall towards the bastion which was under heavy fire from the Spanish.

‘We’re fucking fucked,’ Mercer snarls to Hesse who is urging the men to remain steady. Down the line Fox is yelling blasphemes as canon balls fly past him.

‘You don’t say?’ Hesse hisses back. ‘We’ve enough supplies for two more days of this then we’re going to start hurdling tar and rocks over like the goddamn middle ages.’

‘Is nothing coming through from England?’

‘Four hundred tons - weapons and powder, but it’s not here yet.’

‘Only four hundred?’

‘Apparently your  _honourable_ East India Company sold the rest of their supplies to some slaver merchants. The navy, I hear, was the second port of call despite there being a dire war on.’

Mercer seethes. Stomps off to take care of a faulty cannon. Mentally wishes a pox unto the thirteenth generation for the  _fucker_ who decided that was a good decision.

 

-

 

Nugent, By God’s blood we’ll not hold.

Foxe, If you weren’t a fucking heretic we’d hold.

Nugent, What does that have to do with anything?

Hesse, I swear you two —

 

-

 

The Spanish are pounding the hardest at the San Pablo Battery, part of the northern most bastion of the city. Nugent is given command of the men in the part of the defense and they are holding admirably under the conditions. Mercer, keeping count of artillery for Hesse, counts twenty six guns and sixteen mortars on the enemy’s side. Nugent has half that. They are desperate. Then, of course, there is angry, furious Foxe who had wanted to return to England with Rooke but had been denied by Hesse.

 

- 

 

Foxe nods to Mercer on the first evening of the siege. ‘You working for the old Austrian now?’ Mercer shrugs. Foxe takes this as encouragement. ‘He’s not that bad. If you like that sort of thing. Dirty Catholic, you know.’

‘Sir, half our troops are dirty Catholics.’

‘Just so. Why do you think we’re loosing.’

‘Because we’re undermanned and under-gunned.’

‘That, and God’s will.’

‘Perhaps.’ Mercer doesn’t choose to speak on behalf of God. Never seems to go well for those who do.

‘Do you miss England?’ Foxe asks. He has relocated himself to the table Mercer is at. This gives the spy pause. Foxe, being a man of noble birth and gentlemanly status, is not the sort to exchange words with Mercer’s sort. Also, why is everyone asking him if he misses England? He decides there must be something about his face that begs the question.

‘I find I do, sir. When the fighting starts.’

‘But not when it’s peaceful?’

‘No sir. Not then.’

Foxe glances over his shoulder, then back to Mercer, ‘tell me your thoughts on our esteemed commander. Englishman to Englishman.’

‘He’s Austrian.’

‘Yes, isn’t he just? Put Nugent in charge.’

‘He did, didn’t he. You were with Nugent in Ireland?’

‘Sadly. You seen any fighting before this?’

Another shrug. Some. Here and there. A little on the continent. A little over in the New World. He doesn’t say which sides he was on.

Standing with an empty mug, Foxe pats his shoulder, ‘you’re a good man, I can see. A soldier like me. An Englishman. Protestant I recon as well. You don’t look the sort to go for popery. I’ve someone you ought to meet.’ He smiles, big and wide. It is cheerful. It is a sun in the dark of the tavern. ‘His name is Church. John Church. From uh, from the north. Like you. Here he is.’ A big bluff man crosses the room, red hair and round faced. ‘Mr Church this here is Mr Mercer. Watch what you say around him, he’s Hesse’s spy.’

Mercer stands and takes the offered hand. Together they sit, with Church taking Foxe’s now empty seat. The commander saunters back across the room to Nugent and begins to make snide comments. The two soldiers eye the scene for a silent moment.

Church, ‘They’re both awful you know.’

Mercer, ‘It certainly seems that way to me.’

Church sips his ale good and slow. He watches Mercer for a long moment as he does so. Finally he finds that he must speak. The other man, Church guesses to be around his age, is silent as the grave. Grave as the grave as well.

‘Where you from?’

‘Manchester.’

Ah! Church grins. ‘York man myself. Well, good, I always feel at home when I have another northerner to hate. How did you end up in this hell hole?’

‘I sort of fell into it. As you do. And yourself, Mr Church?’

Church nodded along, ‘I was with Rooke then apparently didn’t get back on board a boat soon enough. How do you like soldiering?’

‘It pays occasionally, which is more than I can say for work in London.’

‘Cor isn’t that the truth of it. It was ah, gaol or the navy for me.’

Mercer makes a face. Gaol, he sniffs, not a place I want to go back to.

‘Nor me. So I said bugger the Queen and took to the mast. Though, part of me wants to cut loose and be a privateer.’ Church grins, suddenly. ‘We could take off to the east.’

Mercer doesn’t remember indicating he wanted to be a privateer. Church gets up, says he’ll buy the next round. Mercer lets him. The red hair is a bit much but he likes the man’s wide, round face and his easy manners.

Returning the York-man begins to talk of places far off. India, he speculates on for a good twenty minutes. Then China, which he desperately wants to see. Oh and perhaps, if luck and God are with him, he will make it as far as Japan. He asks Mercer if he has been anywhere foreign.

‘I went to New France a while ago. And ah, Boston. I did some time fighting up there. It was during the war. They call it King William’s War over there. After, I was down in the Caribbean for a little.’ He pauses. Frowns at the memories. ‘Met a man named Hector Barbossa down there. Some sort of a run-away Cambridge man. Everyone down there is a run-away something. He was a pirate, speaking of your earlier comment. We went to New Spain and saw Mexico City. It’s vast, you know. Built on the model of the ideal cities created in idle speculation by the Italians. The ones where everything is symmetrical and the center is the cathedral and the royal palace then the streets jut out from it in a circular, repetitive symmetrical fashion.

‘The thing with Mexico City, it has an older name, Tenochtitlan, but the thing is that it’s built on top of a lake. So it has a tendency to sink. They need to get some Venetian or Dutch architects in there to bolster the foundations and redo the canal system. It’s a lot of marble because they were trying to create this ideal Spanish or Italian city on what they thought was the blank slate of this new land and instead it falls down around them.’ Stopping, suddenly, he realizes he hadn’t meant to say all of this to Church. But the man is smiling and looking at him with encouragement. He wants to know it all, a little like Hans with his almost childlike exuberance for the unknown. Until he joined the navy he had never left England, he had explained. So everything is new to him. The world is so big, so unknown, and so exciting.

‘What happened to your friend?’ He asks when he thinks Mercer has finished.

‘My friend?’

‘That pirate, Barbossa.’

‘Oh, well,’ a sneer. ‘He’s probably hanging from a gibbet. And it would be his just desserts if it is true.’

‘Didn’t end well?’

Mercer gives him a hard look.

‘Your friendship. It didn’t end well.’

‘Did I say he was a friend?’

Church relaxes, No, you didn’t. I had assumed. Apologies. Did he steal anything from you? Seeing as he was a pirate. 

'Only an apple. A green one. Like what Eve ate in Eden.' 

 

-

 

Later, they play cards and drink whiskey which Mercer has smuggled in from the Spanish camps. Church tells him of growing up in York and his blacksmith father who always said that the Church’s had greatness in them, if only someone would dig it out. John thinks maybe his father had hopes that he would be the one to raise their fortunes but instead he fell in with a bad lot, had a brawling son with a prostitute, had another brawling daughter with a washer woman, and spent too much money, got into too many fights, and eventually ended up in front of magistrate one too many times.

‘Ever been a disappointment to a parent?’ He asks.

Mercer says he wouldn’t know that feeling. Church sighs, ‘it sort of sticks with you. Like a bur. Crushed into the hem of a coat you don’t notice it until it plucks at bare skin and then you think “ah yes! The bur of my father, the bur of my mother I had forgotten you until now” and you pick at it until you bleed.’

 

 

The next two days of the siege pass. October is slowly ending. Mercer thinks it has been one hell of a month and cannot imagine November being worse. News creeps into the beleaguered city that Leake was on his way with ships, men, supplies, and gunpowder. There is merriment for an evening.

 

 

Nights are spent drinking with Church or spying on Fox and Nugent. Fox, Mercer is suspicious of, but there appears to be nothing in it besides an Englishman’s natural disdain for anything and anyone deemed  _un-English._

It takes a few days, but battles bring an intensity to people that cannot be recreated outside an environment of imminent death. The San Pablo Battery is going to be breached, soon. Everything is on a knife’s edge. Church, on the third evening of their acquaintance, manages to get the story of Mercer’s meeting Henriette out of him.

‘We met at Leandenhall Market. I was being chased by the Thief Taker and she whacked him over the head with her bag for me. We took off and hid near Jonathan’s Coffee House of all places. Later than night I returned her to her residences for we had spent the remainder of the day making confusing trails through the city. We were certain we were going to be caught at any moment.’

‘How old were you?’

He counts back the years. He thinks on events, the death of William, before that  _Don Quixote_ in English, before that the Calender change, then Henriette’s death, before that the burning of the Palace of Whitehall.

‘I would have been around thirty, maybe a year or two under it, when we met.’

Church looks rose eyed.

‘I love a romantic tale.’

Mercer sneers, ‘I would hardly count this as romantic.’ He coughs. They re-deal the cards. Up on the battlements there is the sea breeze which causes havoc with playing cards but Church found a nook where they could play and catch a quick drink between it all. ‘Well, one thing lead to another, as they do, and we ended up sharing digs.’

Church is laughing, ‘you’re doing this on purpose. Making it less than it was.’

A shrug, you believe what you like about it. The red haired man motions to him, Sorry, sorry, continue. I’ll keep my peace.

‘A year later there was a daughter. Henriette named her Lisette-Marie. She gave her another name as well, one in her own language, but I can’t remember it and besides, I think only Henriette was to use it.’

‘How many names does a French person have?’

‘What?’

‘Well your Henriette, she was French right?’

‘She spoke French.’

‘Right. Lisette-Marie is already a French name.’

‘Henriette wasn’t French.’ Church looks confused. Mercer sighs. ‘She was from Haiti, sort of, but the Gold Coast originally. Well, not the Gold Coast properly. She spoke of this large lake that her people lived near. Inland a bit from the shore. She and her sister had been out playing and then some men from another tribe came and kidnapped them, along with others, and they marched them to the sea and sold them off.’

Outside the walls they can hear the Spanish singing lewd songs about the English and Dutch. Church is very intent on the cards, Mercer is smiling but it is cruel.

‘So she…’

‘Was a slave? Yes. Well, former slave. She said she freed herself but sometimes she had a look in her eye as she said this so I’m not sure what she meant by it.’ He can guess, he doesn’t add. Church, for all his gambling and his rough and tumble life, seems rather gentle.

‘So your daughter…’

‘Is half black.’

Church winces. He says he had no idea. It feels as if Mercer is being brutal. Brutally calm. Brutally still. Brutally absent. His voice has no inflection, Church has noticed, when he speaks of the past. It is flat. As if he is withdrawing himself from it. Pulling away from the memory as it break forth into speech and therefore re-existence.

‘I’m sorry I brought it up.’ He tries. Mercer blinks makes a face, finally an expression, it seems to say, So what of it? ‘Your daughter, she still lives?’

‘She does. With my sister in London.’ He waits. Church seems to want more information. ‘She’ll be nine in December.’ There is still that heavy waiting pause. ‘She can read and write and likes to play with her cousin’s wooden sword.’ There, Church grins at it, is some smug pride. ‘He gets angry at her and says she is not being lady like.’

‘Well, she isn’t you must own.’

‘No. But that’s all right. No one in my family is a Lady or Gentleman so why should any of us play to it?’

 

-

 

Church takes up with the angry Scotsman McKilney who still lifts his kilt to the Spanish every morning. Only, unlike before, they’ve taken to making pot shots at him. They’ve hit the feather in his hat but not else. Sometimes, when he’s feeling vitriolic, he shakes all God gave him at them. Sometimes, he even takes a piss off the battlement. He calls out, ‘Anyone for the Blood of Christ?’ before hand. Church thinks it riot. Mercer merely looks mildly disgusted.

‘He’s all right, Mercer.’ Church says, taking his arm. ‘Once you get to know him. Not nearly as terrible a prospect as it is getting to know you. He doesn’t bristle every three seconds.’

‘I don’t bristle.’

Church grins. Mercer rolls his eyes. Fine, the Lancashire-man says to the Yorkshire-man, I’ll drink with him and his ilk.

The ilk McKilney keeps is a motley crew of Habsburg Spanish officers, a handful of clergymen and various Englishmen of rank and file.

They all get roaringly drunk on the first meeting. McKilney and Church pledge undying friendship to each other. The Spanish teach the English how to say “whore” and “Christ’s blood” in their language. The English return the favour. Mercer teaches them all how to say dirty words in French and a strange language from New Spain which trips up their tongues and causes much laughter.

Walking back to his rooms, arm in arm with Church, Mercer says in French, Oh fuck this. Tugs the other man into an alley way, presses him up against a wall and kisses him soundly. Church blinks at him when they part ways.

‘Blood of Mary I never thought you’d get around to it,’ is his only reply. They stumble upstairs and behind closed doors. Mercer figures he’ll worry about any potential witnesses in the morning. It is war, after all, tragedies and accidents do happen.


	5. Chapter 5

Mountains haunt modern man. The rock of Gibraltar is not a mountain in the sense of Mont Blanc or Mont Ventauxor even Snowden but it suffices to remind men that they are small and to create a desire to control. 

Mountains are not silent. There is wind and trees and animals clattering in their own spheres, making noise, living, even if no human is there to provide them with existence through hearing and knowing and seeing. Glaciers, high up in the Alps, are monoliths of frozen life and they too are not silent. They crack and groan and scrape against rock and foundations and compress layer upon layer of snow till it becomes ice. It has not happened yet, but a scientist will dig into a glacier by Mont Blanc and he will see the layers and understand something of the fact that the world is older than anything he could have imagined. Darwin will later take his writings and expand upon them. Everything is weaving through each other, around each other. Mountains are creators of webs and interrupters of webs.

First-ness is an argument that becomes pressing when mountains are discussed. Who was first? If two people stand upon the summit are they standing level to one another? What will be the myth after descent? There is the point, Mercer has yet to realize but will eventually, that when one reaches the top there is naturally only one direction to go – downwards.

Humans are ascending at this time of 1704. They have yet to summit, but they will, and then what?

 

-

 

Mercer, when he first arrived in Gibraltar, took one of the more direct routes up to the summit via the Devil’s Tower road. The view was, naturally, stunning. Sheer cliff to the east and the slopping, jagged working down to the city itself. It reminded him of a shipwreck with people clinging fast to the ruins in the water. This city clinging tight to the sharp, cruel edges of the rock. The rock is dead, the rock cannot feel, cannot know. But, despite this, there are memories. There are hints of lives lived and the knowledge that blood has soaked into the rock and stone and dirt of this peninsula. 

There are remembrances of the Moors. An old watch tower here, sections of a wall there. At the tip of the point the rock it is a sheer drop to crashing waves below. Mercer stands at cliff edge, now, looking out to French fleet and an fresh sunrise. The siege – oh the siege – it goes on. It makes his skin itch, the confinement.

Mountains are claustrophobic in their way. They crowd up against you, force you to take notice, cannot, will not back down. They catch your breath and keep it for themselves. They are confining, their spatial reality an assault on senses and reason.

 

He thinks about the top of the rock with its sharp air and clouds that slide like silken snakes down over the edge. To Church, who follows him like a dog, he says, I could have thrown myself off the cliff and been content.

Church is horrified. Which cliff? The white ones of Dover? Somewhere in the Americas?

No, he scowls at the man. This one here. Back in September I went to the top and could see all of us and the Spanish and the French and our mad Italian friends who are still here despite it all. And there was this cloud. It was so thin, I’ve not seen any like it before so close, and while around me it was like fog when I got away from it and could look back it was a scarf draping over the edge of the cliff. A soft, silent waterfall of air. I thought I could do it, you know. I could jump and die but it’d be all right.

He looks at Church, looks at him hard, at his smile and his wide face and his brilliantly sunny red hair and sees that the man does not understand him. 

‘Don’t do it,’ Church pleads with his smile turning remorseful. ‘I would not want to find you like that.’

‘I’m not going to.’

‘Good.’

That, Mercer thinks, was not the point.

Sieges are perhaps the epitome of claustrophobia with everyone on top of each other, snapping and snarling. More so than that small cabin in the woods of New France he heard of. But still, as they walk back to the town proper, Mercer thinks that perhaps mountains are more confining in their sheerness than any citadel or walled fort. If Old Bailey was a mountain, it’d be Mont Blanc _._ White walled and cold and filled with ice and heartless men.

 

-

 

Cutler returns to London. Locke died October 28th and his father remains still in Essex holding the hand of Damaris for what it is worth. Her husband Francis absconds back to London with Cutler before it is proper but neither Francis’ wife nor Cutler’s father seem to notice.

‘It’s a damned rotten thing to be around when your wife’s lover shuffles off the mortal coil.’ Francis says as they disembark by Parliament. Cutler coughs and searches the crowd for a moment. There is no one he knows. George, he reasons, will be at the club under a table. It is past noon, after all.

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘Well, let it be a lesson to you lad when you marry. Make yourself scarce when the wife’s lover is about to die. Dashed unpleasant.’

‘And if your lover is about to die?’

‘What of it?’

‘Should your wife be scarce then?’

‘I suppose,’ Francis peers at him. ‘Maybe. I hadn’t thought on it.’

‘No.’

‘Well, cheers to you my lad. Good luck with whatever it is you do. You told me, I know, but I didn’t follow a word I’m afraid. Old man now, eh?’

‘Indeed.’

‘That’s the spirit. Say hello to that friend of yours who has all the lady-friends. He sounds like a chap after my own heart.’

‘I’ll pass it on to George.’

‘Do that. Look, I’ll call at your club in a few days. We can have a drink. This Stanhope fellow isn’t as smart as you is he?’

‘I’m afraid so. But don’t worry, he’s usually drunk.’

‘Excellent! We’ll get on then. Look, look, I shan’t keep you and I really ought to be going as well but could you do me a blessed favour? When your father returns could you ask him how Damaris is doing? Truly? She’ll never tell me, you know. She’s always right and proper and doing dandy when I ask. Here, take my arm for a moment and we’ll walk at least to the end of the street. There’s a good lad. You know I am not a smart man, but I can still see people. My wife, I see her and how she despises me. Thinks me ridiculous, I don’t mind, she has good company if that is her opinion. But I can also see that she is in pain and she won’t tell me. She just won’t tell me. So if you could get it from your father what, if anything there is I can do, you’ll tell me?’

‘Of course. I’ll ask directly he returns. Well, maybe not directly, but you take my meaning.’

‘Good lad, good lad. Well, till a later time then.’

 

-

 

At their club George Stanton has yet to make it under the table but he is close. At the moment half his fortune is written on a piece of paper and he is holding a king of hearts and a queen of spades.

‘Do you think I have it?’ He asks when Cutler throws himself into a chair beside the two players.

‘Probably not. But you’ll win it back later.’

‘Right. All in then.’ George and their friend Sprat shove the slips forward and lay down their cards. It’s Sprat.

Sprat grins wickedly. It’s a mousey smile with too many freckles and sharp teeth. ‘That evens it up after last week. You cleared out my account in an hour.’

Stanhope is laconic. Rolling his shoulders, eyeing the two men in front of him in a haze. Cutler glares at both then gets up and pours himself a drink. He declares that he just had the longest ride in the history of travel. If that man isn’t the stupidest man in England he’ll be confounded because he cannot think of stupider. By the way, George, here’s the ten shillings I owe, good show with bagging the girl while I was gone.

‘Don’t leave for so long, Cutler. I had no one to lounge with by fireplaces and make disparaging remarks to concerning dinner party attendees.’

‘Christ your life must have been a hell.’

‘You’ve no idea. Did you get me the job I wanted?’

‘Stay on the chair and I’ll tell you what I’ve arranged. It’s a holdover until something better turns up then you get my job and I’ll take the promotion.’

 

They talk late into the night, pausing only for George to lean out a window and vomit. Beckett watches and feels something. It makes his mouth tug down into a frown. He cannot place it, but it brings back a conversation he had with the dying Locke about John’s youth and growing up. But the young company man is in the brandy and it is three in the morning and George cannot walk straight enough to get from the club to a whorehouse and even if he could, he is too drunk to be of any use to anyone in that regard. Sprat is playing cards and is sober.

That, Beckett thinks, is why I do not like the man. Can he not have a single drink?

Sprat smiles at Beckett when he catches the fellow watching him.

‘I was the first, you know,’ Sprat says. George is lying on the floor with his hands resting on his stomach regarding what he believes is a living, breathing ceiling in a spinning vortex of a room.

‘At what?’

‘Of our group to marry.’

‘Yes. You are.’

‘Have you thought of marriage?’ Sprat deals out a hand for solitaire. Puts an ace up.

‘Not really. My father has a list, I’m sure.’

Sprat nods. They both look to George. Will he ever marry, Sprat wonders aloud. Only when hell freezes over and God sees fit to remove all whores from easy access, Cutler replies.

 

-

 

Cutler’s father drops a missive on his desk, ‘Apparently your friend is wretched ill.’

He opens it. It’s from George’s sister begging for him to come for she fears that George is dying.

‘This is the man you want me to hire,’ William is smooth as silk as Cutler puts his hat on.

‘He’s top notch when he’s sober.’

‘Get him sober then. I’ll hire him for your sake, my son, but only if he can remain sober for two weeks straight. Go on then.’

 

Cutler leaves. In the carriage he has that feeling again. The one that reminds him of Locke and now his father. He cannot imagine George Stanhope sober for two days let alone two weeks. It is a mad fancy his father has. But then, as George’s sister Sicily runs to him, perhaps it might not be the worst thing for his friend.

‘The doctor was here. He just left not a moment before you arrived. I’ve seen George in rough straits before but not like this. How much did he drink last night?’

‘No idea. He was gone when I got there and then kept going. As he does.’

The room she takes him to is on the first floor and has windows open to the cool autumn air but with curtains drawn. A single candle is lit and there is George sweating, asleep or something like it, and looking as if death is waiting at the foot of his bed.

‘London isn’t a good place to convalesce,’ Sicily explains. ‘But he’s too ill to move. He ah, he’s voided alcohol and food and anything else we tried to give him last night when he arrived home. The doctor says tea and broth for now. Nothing more. Mother says we should remove to the countryside. That it is the fast living of the city that is killing him.’

It is her profile Beckett can see from the corner of his eye. She and her brother share the same nose, the same blonde hair, but she is colder, a silver-gold, whereas George is warm sun-lit wheat.

‘It would be a journey. Your house is in the midlands, correct?’

‘I suggested that we might rent a place near by. In Kent, perhaps. Mother is looking into it.’

‘Has anyone sent word to your father?’

She shakes her head.

They take seats on either side of the bed and watch George sleep. Beckett looks down at his hands, soft and unrefined. He had wished for pianist fingers – something like his cousin’s or Locke’s or Sprat’s. Instead, they are blocky, clumsy looking despite his not being too much of a careless person. He looks over to George’s hands which are large and present and real and currently remind him of how everyone in Carravagio paintings look like they are about to die. The sickly pallour is there, the lifeless droop, the noticeable veins. He cannot see Sicily’s but can remember them from having danced with her once and they were serviceable but nothing to remark upon. But that is much of Sicily, he thinks, serviceable but nothing to remark upon.

Finding that sitting in a room with a friend who may or may not be dying is intolerable and confining Beckett suddenly longs for the countryside with a fierceness he has never felt before. It is too hot in the room, despite the windows being open, it is too dark and the candle too bright because the room is too dark. There is a pile of paper on his desk which needs seeing to and had everything gone to plan George would be there seeing to it with him because they would be working together instead of like this.

‘When are you planning to remove from the city?’

‘In a week. We’ll travel slow, lots of stops, and hopefully the house we rent won’t be too far out. Just enough so we can open windows without fear of foul London air.’

He says, suddenly and without thought, ‘if you need help, I can come along for a little while.’

Sicily nods. She looks neither here nor there on the prospect but says that George would be well pleased to have a friend there. Someone with whom he could lampoon the local villagers with. He takes his leave then, with the sense that she does not want him there anymore. Now that the crises of his knowing and understanding the situation is over.

 

At the door she asks, ‘didn’t you think to stop him?’

‘From what?’

‘Doing this to himself. Wasn’t there a moment when you looked at him and thought that maybe it had been enough?’

‘No, not really. He’ll be fine. It’s George. He rallies.’

Later, he thinks that she had been trying to tell him something and it was the same thing Locke had been trying to say and the same thing his father is saying and Sprat is implying but he cannot figure what.

 

-

 

When Beckett had been at Oxford studying this and that, ostensibly classics and philosophy and whatever else was needed to be a gentleman, he took on with some friends the concept of absolutes. They were with a group, attempting some sort of quasi-philosophical salon, when the concept of life emerged. What is life? What is death? The usual drivel young people contemplate in an attempt to be worldly and stand upon the threshold of new thought. Beckett now has no illusions about the redundancy of the thoughts he held in Oxford, and even probably hold now. He no longer cares to be an original thinker. He tells his sister Elizabeth, ‘is it terrible that I don’t want to be anything?’

She shakes her head, ‘that is the folly of youth. Wanting to be nothing or everything with little regard for practicalities.’ She being eight years senior to him was more mother than sister. She pats his hand. ‘Enjoy Kent, or wherever you are off to. Do write.’ He promises he will for there will be little else to do there. He says it all aloud then hurriedly amends that nothing done for family is a chore. Unless father asks for it.

‘That’s only because you and he are the same person and so hate each other naturally.’

‘We are hardly the same person, Liza. I beg you to reconsider  _that_ deplorable point of view.’

She says she will not, laughs at his expression and kisses his forehead. I must be off, my daughter will be wanting me soon and well, you never understand what it is to love until you have a child.

She leaves. He returns in his mind to Oxford. A part of him so wishes he was back there, now. Not that life had been simple, for it hadn’t, but there had been a certainty that was currently lacking. He imagines Columbus and his little Spanish ships adrift on the sea, rising and dipping with swells and troughs. It must be terrible to be in such a precarious situation with no end in sight.

 

At Oxford it had been decided that life is dependent upon the existence of a past because God, for the moment, had been thrown out of the room for being a nuisance to pure, rational thought. So if history was a necessary predicate for life then theoretically everything had a life. Books, then, had a life. Works of literature with pasts and futures.

‘Rot, that’s a metaphor.’ Sprat had snarled. Beckett had glared.

‘T’is not. We are not speaking of metaphors. You just can’t follow because you’ve nothing between your ears.’

Sprat hissed something to a friend, they both laughed. Beckett had ignored them and continued.

‘Take translation, the first translation of a work cannot be known at the commencement of such a work. It is in the future of that work and once it occurs, for better or worse, there is a distinct divide in the history of that piece. The piece before translation and after translation. The piece has a history and so a life. Therefore, since all literature can be translated (I am not saying they will be good translations but there you are) by that fact alone all literature has a future and a past, therefore a history, therefore life. Christ who do I have to philosophize at to get a drink?’

George had poured him one then. Said he should apologize to Sprat, Beckett had said he would not. Later, they got into a scuffle and only two of the bigger lads had been able to pull them apart. His mother, when the news finally circulated to her, had been worried on account of his constitution. His father had not been able to make heads nor tales of it since when did his son get into fisticuffs? It was not a very Cutler thing to do.

 

-

 

Does a mountain have a life, then? If there are firsts for it then it must – unless those firsts only qualify for the people doing them. As a man who has read history and the classics he thinks the search for origins is not the point. So why the need for finding firsts? Why the need for finding the point of birth? There is a burden of the past, and we are working with that burden. The mountain of firsts and origins and continuations and reinterpretations.

Does a mountain have a life, then? Beckett, with an atlas of Savoy open for no particular reason, thinks that if he is applying the same ridiculous absolutism they had been using back then, the answer is ‘yes’. He finds the Alps, traces south of them to the coast and along the coast to Gibraltar. The supplies purchased by the Navy should be arriving now, he reasons. If Abel had gotten them to Leake in a reasonable amount of time. What is the date now? November 1. Lord, he yawns, time is moving like cold honey. If only there was something to do to make it pass faster. Kent will only be worse. Minutes will be hours and days will be years. Sicily has written to him the details of the trip. There is a stable, she explains, I think you like to ride, if what George has said stands true. So, that will be a distraction beyond caring for a narcissistic, sick fool of a man. Beckett disagrees with the assessment of George but as it came from a sister he supposes he can be forgiving. He doesn’t want to think what Liza’s opinion of him is. Probably not as harsh but nothing to be pleased with either.

 

-

 

McKilney’s ilk, as Mercer thinks of them, have been gathering nightly in a now nameless tavern on the south side of the city. They tend to go quiet when he joins and he finds he misses Hans whose small, childish presence was never minded and men would spill their souls to each other in front of the boy.

Hesse wants to know about the interior of the city. The sins and triumphs of the men under his command. They are great, a multiplicity of frustrations and desires and needs. One man, Reverend Avery of some radical denomination, motions him to join them. Church is next to McKilney, their drunkenly sworn friendship holding true, he smiles as Mercer gingerly takes a seat.

The Reverend is one of a handful of holy men, all English, which in turn are part of the handful of British in the group. The rest are officers with the exceptions of Church, McKilney and Mercer himself. Avery has a bible in front of him but when it is opened Mercer can see a sketch of the harbour and notes concerning points of entry. He sips his ale, eyes the map, looks to McKilney with a raised eyebrow which is quieted down when Church stands to make a toast.

After the toast it is business. The language a bastardization of Spanish and English but it gets the point across well enough. Avery asks, testily, How can we trust this Mister Mercer? He’s Hesse’s man I heard.

Church shakes his head, ‘we can trust him. You have my word.’

McKilney nods, this mollifies Avery who pushes the illicit bible towards the spy. Have a look, he seems to say. Mercer does. The plan is elaborate but requires access to the Spanish outside city walls.

‘Who were you thinking to act as a go between?’ He asks.

‘Someone who is bilingual. Someone they trust…’ McKilney tilts his mug towards Mercer. ‘Church said you might be suited for the job. Since you speak Spanish and are known to them.’

‘When would we want to open the gates to them?’

‘In a few days. We know they’re planning a heavy assault on the northern wall. Charles, the other spy for Hesse, came to me with the news. Very hush-hush at the moment. He doesn’t want the men getting itchy.’

There were jeers of “too late for that” and “damn the Austrian pigs who run this sinking ship” and “fuck the sodding king of Spain, whoever he is”.

‘Are you interested?’ McKilney asks. Church is looking hopeful. Avery distrustful. Mercer regards the rest of the group. Their faces he has memorized. He would be able to pick them out in a field of the dead, which he may very well have to do. Their names he will work on. Church, he knows, is always eager to acquaint him with people. Claims he needs friends. Mercer nods. Says, Oh yes. I’m very interested.

 

-

 

When Mercer and Church retire back to Mercer’s rooms they fuck on the floor so there will be  a splinter in Church’s knee the next morning and his arms will be perhaps a little sore.

After, Church says, ‘I miss England. When we return I suppose you’ll be in London?’ A shift. Silence. He takes it as confirmation. ‘I don’t think I could abide the city. Too big. Too many people. But your family is there, right? Your sister and daughter?’

‘That’s right.’

‘York is all right.’

‘Big too.’

‘Not as big as London.’

‘No.’

‘Would you ever think of moving back north? Back to Manchester or maybe Liverpool?’

Mercer rolls to face Church and has such a look of abhorrence upon his face that the other man cannot help but laugh. Right, right, Church kisses him, I forgot your hatred of Liverpool.

‘I hate most things, you know.’

‘I don’t believe that.’ Another kiss. Mercer scowls through it. ‘I just think you like to say things you don’t believe.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because you are scared but it’s all right. I’m scared half the time, too.’ Church tries to pull Mercer close but the other man rolls out of his reach. Hand shoots out from the sheets and he gropes for breeches and shift.

‘I have to go on patrol. I’ll see you in the morning.’ With clothes half on he faces Church and can see the wide, handsome face with the silly red hair looking at him with tenderness. He scowls. Church smiles more. He thinks, Well, there’s a thing. ‘You should probably go back to your rooms. I think Charles is suspicious.’

They part ways down in a still darkened alley. Mercer to Hesse’s office, Church to his own rooms. Off down an alley a woman sings a song. It is sad and slow and twists its way through darkened, shuttered streets.

 

-

 

November 2 and Foxe is dead. A musket ball to the back of the head helped him along, one of those nice soft ones. Church walks down from the north wall and as he looks back, into twilight, he sees Foxe die. He sees the entirety of the man’s death. He does not think he will ever understand it. McKilney draws him away, Don’t think on it, laddie.

‘But didn’t you see?’

‘See what? A man die in the heat of a battle?’

‘No, that wasn’t it.’

‘What was it then?’

Church cannot say it. McKilney nods, satisfied. That’s right, sometimes things happen. It was an accident I am sure. Just, don’t bring it up all right? Welcome to war, my boy.

 

-

 

Church, that night, Why did you do it?

Mercer, facing the wall, they are in bed with a pile of sheets atop them, Why did I do what?

Shoot him.

Shoot who?

Church cannot say it. Mercer turns over to face him. He is calm, Church remembers the way he had spoken of Henriette’s death, like he had been discussing the weather. He cannot believe a man to be emotionless. He cannot believe a man to be soulless. It flies in the face of what he knows to be true which is based on his own passion for everything alive.

He reaches for the other man, wraps an arm around a waist. Mercer shifts, tries to throw him off, but Church holds on tight and will not let him go. He thinks he is giving comfort, letting his lover know he is not alone without words, since Mercer does not seem to like words very much. Words between people, that is. He had described it as a constant translation. Everything is a translation even between those speaking the same language. Church had nodded along but had not understood. How could he? There was no translation for Mercer’s mind. So now he holds Mercer and hopes that one day he will be told what is haunting the man for sure only someone in a lot of pain could do such a thing.

 

- 

 

Hesse wants to strangle someone. He thinks he should keep a person on hand for occasions such as this.

‘Foxe is dead, Nugent is dying, we’re running out of supplies, no one knows when Leake will arrive with support, and now we have a rebellion planned. Excellent. Just what I need. The three of you are like the fates. Go on then, cut my thread.’ He pauses, hands still in air but they are lowered and he decompresses. Lets a breath out through his teeth. Before him are his spies, the Scotsman, the Englishman, and the Bavarian.

‘Look, McKilney,’ he pauses. ‘Keep postponing as long as you can. At the moment I don’t have the man power or reserves to deal with the arrest and proceedings necessary for such a case. Especially since officers are involved.’ Eyes switch from the Scotsman to the Englishman and Bavarian. ‘You two need to stop trying to kill each other, or whatever it is you do, and learn to pull together. I don’t care if you’re from an ancient line of families with centuries of hate between each other and you both vowed vengeance on your dying father’s bedside. Stop smirking, Mercer. I don’t care. Make shift, pull together, murder each other after the war. Mercer, keep working with McKilney. Charles, keep up with the French. Hopefully we’ll make it through this war in one piece.’

‘Nugent hasn’t.’

‘Mercer, I said no snark.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

‘Out. All three of you rogues.’

 

 

On the street they adjust their hats and gloves and coats.

‘Well,’ Charles grimaces. ‘He was in a jolly mood.’

McKilney shrugs, waves his farewell and trots off to the denizens of the deep who lounge about the docks making trouble. Charles turns to Mercer, squints up at him and says he knows Mercer’s secret. And which secret is this? You killed Foxe, I wonder how Hesse will take that. Don’t know, you should ask him. Charles raises eyebrows so he looks like a wide-eyed, blinking fish. Ah, well then and,  your friend there, Church, he one of us?

Mercer shrugs. He’s non-committal. Charles sighs, Fine, fine, keep your secrets. But if he isn’t, what is it that you barbarous English to do each other? Hang until nearly dead then chop into many pieces?

‘Hang, drawn and quartered. Yes, that’ll be his fate.’

Charles gives him a long, steady look. Finally, turning away he gives a “good day” and thinks that he would take the public executioner over Mercer’s reptilian presence any day of the week.

 

-

 

Mid-November and one of the men is caught in communication with the enemy. A young Dutch man who Mercer thinks cannot be more than seventeen. He is hanged but before he dies he gives the name of Reverend Avery as co-conspirator.

‘They racked him,’ Mercer tells Church. They are huddled by the back defences of the city as Hesse is moving men about. Mostly to diffuse rebellious intent but also because Charles has warned him of an attack from the rear.

Church looks sick. He wants to know, Were any other names given? Was mine, he didn’t ask. Was yours?

‘Colonels Gonzalez and Husson, a few other clergymen…the British officers have been implicated but the proof is all very thin.’

‘And non officers?’

‘No proof at the moment.’

Church looks at him steadily. He thinks he might be on the verge of a realization but it disappears from him. Slips through his grasp as wisps of smoke through the air.

‘How did he get caught?’

Mercer is neither here nor there. It’s war, people get caught. He was young and rash and look, he takes Church by the arm. It is a steal grip. Look, he continues, I think it’d be best if you stopped associating with them.

‘And you?’

No reply.

‘How did the boy get found out?’

‘He made a mistake would be my assumption.’

Church, bewildered, pulls away. He shakes his head, there is something wrong with it all. ‘You  _are_ on our side are you not?’

‘I’m on the side that is going to keep me alive the longest.’

The red haired man, with his wide face and soft smile, can only think of the other men. His friends, he considers them, with their longing to see home. The forlorn hope of this siege ending in anything other than bloodshed. The sure knowledge that the only way out, if not through this trickery, is by the end of a Spanish bayonet.

‘John’s girl, back home in Cornwall, is to have a child.’ Church says it. He sounds desperate. He isn’t sure of what is happening except that the boy shouldn’t have been caught. The Dutch one with the map sewn into his bag. ‘And then there’s Milton who is to take over his father’s shop when he’s done fighting. Bernard has a sick brother he cares for in Leeds…’ He trails off. Mercer isn’t looking at him, not really. Rather, through him.

‘You’re going to stay on with this, then?’ He asks.

‘Of course. Aren’t you?’

‘With one man caught, others sure to follow. You do know the punishment for treason? The trial won’t be here. It will be in England where friends and family will know all about it. The execution will be a public spectacle and your head will be stuck up so London crows can peck at it. I saw Sir Thomas Armstrong executed. Do you remember him? Part of the Rye House Plot, fled to Leiden but was caught and returned to England. George Jeffreys was the one who sentenced Armstrong to death. It was high summer, very hot, very sticky. His head was in-front of Westminster, the other bits were in London and Stafford. When he was being quartered they piled his body parts in a heap like they do to cows or pigs. He was naked, without modesty.

‘It used to be that they would put the heads on London Bridge but it’s been a while since they’ve done that. Not since the farcical Popish Plot. That’s the thing to remember, Church, even if you run they will catch you and they will haul you back to England in chains and you will be made a fool of and you will killed. If people don’t like you well enough, or if the crowd is antsy for blood, they may very well tear your body apart for the executioner. Save him a job. I’ve heard of it happening.’ He stops, suddenly, and he is now looking at Church as if seeing him for the first time. He lays a hand on the man’s shoulder then traces up his neck so he’s cupping his face. ‘What I’m saying is, honour and friendship are well and good but if it’s between you and the hangman or my life, I am going to choose my life. I recommend you do something similar.’

 

When he leaves Church sinks back into the wall, slides down so he is sitting in mud and dirt and there is a rat peering at him from behind a pile of refuse. He can still feel the hand on his shoulder, his beck, his face. He thinks, wildly, madly, that this is what poor Queen Anne must have felt when taken to the tower. Confused, shaken, unknowing, staring out into the blank future and uncertain of which road will take you from the forest.

It starts to rain and with a shaking body Church stands, dusts himself off as best he can, and makes for his rooms. He is stopped along the way my McKilney, friendly and warm, ‘Come have a drink. You look terrible.’

‘I think I’ll pass.’

McKilney steps back, peers at Church for a moment then shrugs. ‘If it suits you.’

‘McKilney-’ the Scotsman turns at his name. ‘When you said to not mind Foxe’s death even though – even though it weren’t a Spanish musket that killed him, what did you mean? And not that it’s war.’

‘Did you ask him?’

‘Course.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, lad, I warrant he had his reasons. Men usually do.’

‘But Foxe, he was for our cause.’

McKilney starts, settles down again, ‘No, I wouldn’t go around saying things like that. He weren’t, understood? He died in battle, tragically, honourably, gloriously. That is all. He and Nugent are both the glorious dead. Let it be.’

Church bows, says he’ll see McKilney later. That he has some things he needs to think about. He goes off into the unforgiving night.

 

-

 

Above the city, the embattled armies, the Spanish attempting to climb around the back side of the rock, the lilting, shifting French ships, is a rock. Church looks up to it, before he ducks into his rooms, and can see clouds around the top. They hang low, and heavy, and he thinks it will rain yet again that night. There is gun fire in the distance but the pounding has stopped for the moment. He remembers being a young man and standing up on the walls of York to see the unending expanse of Yorkshire around him. The little rolls up and down of the land, the green, the grey, the mud. He remembers no knowing what true height was until he was put before the mast his Majesty’s Pleasure. Even still, he does not think to climb the rock. There are roads and paths cut into the jagged side and of course, the old Moorish ruins haunting the rock as much as the rock haunts the city. But he does not think to climb.

That night he sleeps and he dreams of falling and then he is no longer falling but he is watching an executioner, who is Hesse, pushing the sad Dutch boy off a ladder and the rope tightening around the boy’s neck and for some reason is hands are not bound and so the lad is scrapping and clawing at his neck so there are bloody ribbons and the rope just grows tighter and tighter until there is no more boy or ladder or sneering crowd but it’s Mercer and they’re in bed and he is saying, I burned down Whitehall and stood across the river and wondered if it was going to take the rest of the city with it. I drank whiskey. It had been my birthday, not that I know what day I was born on. I will burn down Gibraltar next, and all of you within it. A wartime funeral pyre. You think me only half a spy but I do nothing by halves.

He wakes, sweating. There are drums. He throws his clothes on, chases after the ever disappearing thoughts. Mercer told me something in my dream and now I cannot remember it but I know that it was important.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

George Stanhope, sober, is a miserable sight. He grouches and is surly and snaps at his sister and mother. Cutler, he refrains from insulting since he knows he will be working with his friend and figures it best to keep those waters calm. They have been nursing him back to his usual vigour and George, being young and once past the immediate danger, makes leaps and bounds. Beckett tries to remember his friend as he was, pale, yellow about the edges, sweating, shaking, occasionally begging to God but no one knew what for.

 

A moment of clarity in the delusions:

'Cutler,' George whispers. The smaller man had been by the window, peering out through a crack in the heavy curtains. The doctor had been clear in his orders, keep him cool and in the dark until he is ready for the light. It was too Platonic for Cutler's tastes but there was little for it since life does not imitate art or art life, no matter what artists and writers argued. 'I had a dream of her.'

'Of who?'

'A lady in white and she had red roses in her hair. We went to sleep beneath a willow tree. There was gold and a locked chest.'

'It's the laudanum.'

'It is God speaking to me.'

Beckett sits by his friend's side. George reaches, or tries to, for his hand. He whispers that Beckett cannot understand for he has never known death. He has never known what it is to be falling and falling and falling and seeing dark eyes devouring him and dark hands grasping for him and to be upon ground that was glass and it was shattering.

'I am paying penance for my many sins.' He expalins. Beckett replies that they neither are papists and so should not act it. 'But I am,' George is insistent. 'I drink and I gamble and I whore and I spend more than I ought and I am vain and silly and given over to frivolous things.'

'You sound like my father admonishing me.'

'I'm admonishing myself.'

He slips back into sleep. It had been early morning. Beckett takes tea and reads _St Albans' Gruesome Murders_ thinking perhaps two of the four stories might be true. There are other scandal papers littering the chairs and desk and he wonders which it is who enjoys them – the sister or the mother. Both, he thinks, probably both. They need a third then they can be the Witches of Macbeth. Cruel talons and sharp teeth.

 

A moment of delusion in the clarity:

George speaks of a mountain and demons that live atop it so the peak is called Maudit for it is cursed and doomed. He speaks of another place, far away, in India where men die as they clambor for the highest position to be held by a mortal upon this earth. God does not will it and so none have accomplished this peak and have lived to tell the tale. It is like Babel. Babel, George continues, which signified confusion. Confusion as common and proper noun. Babel is God's name and names are unstranslatable like God is untranslatable. They had tried to make a single language of mankind and so God killed them and made many. George says, with eyes crakced one, 'you who work with translation, Cutler.'

'I do work with translations for the company. Soon you will, too.'

'Translation comes from Babel and so from death. The necessary restitution of texts and creation of life for texts, remember that old conversation? That comes from death for God killed them all because he could not abide the tower and the single language.'

Hieronymus is mad again.

Cutler reads poetry by Thomas Wyatt and dreams about chasing a hind through green boughs. Where is Robin Hood? He will not be back anytime soon. Return later, maybe then.

He wakes. He wonders when he has begun to have George's twisted dreams that make no sense. He tells his unconscious friend, 'I once dreamt of a viking ship with a woman standing upon the bow. She was black and had braids in her hair. There was fire everywhere. And creatures from the deep, strange and unknown, devoured the fallen sailors.'

  
  


Everything comes in tides, gentle and slow, fast and sudden. When the fever breaks everything is uphill to the point where George feels as if nothing has happened.

'You prayed to God in your sleep,' Sicily says. She is severe.

'Yes, well, he answered them didn't he?'

'You said you would change your ways.'

George grins at her, pats her cheek, You're sweet.

'Don't call me sweet.'

He leaves off for he thinks her in a terrible mood. She looks to Beckett and scowls at him, as if George's dismissal is his fault.

 

 

'Two weeks.' George moans, flopping onto Beckett's bed. His voice muffled in the blankets. Cutler, seated at his desk surrounded by papers sent down from London, does not deign to reply. 'Your father is a cruel man.'

'He's a necessary man.' He doesn't look up from his work.

'Cruel. I can't do it.' George rolls onto his back. Stares at the canopy. Decides it is very ugly and easily fifteen years out of date.

'Yes you can.'

'I can't, Cutler. You know me. Wine, women, and the tables are my lifeblood. I cannot live a sober life. It is not God's will for me.'

'You sang a different tune last week. But then-'

'I was ill.'

'You were ill. Evidently you suffer overmuch, George.'

'This week is slower than the process of Mary loosing her virginity.' At this Cutler looks up. There is a smeared powder line on his forehead. His hair could use a trim. George tilts his head back to look at his friend so the world is upside down. 'La. There you are. You're a mess, you know. Ink stained and powdered.'

'What do you want?'

'Let's go for a ride. It'll be something to do. Sicily can come so there will be two people for me to harass.'

Outside it is beautiful weather, a strange feat for November. The sun is weak, though, and the effect is one of gossamer. If the world was wearing muslin, fine and thin that costs ten shillings a yard. If the world was a woman the muslin would be pale green and pricked with golden flowers. Her eyes would be blue, her hair black.

'All right, fine, we'll go out. I'll finish my work later.'

'Excellent.'

His friend springs up, grabs ahold of the bed post. Too fast, he says. Beckett isn't paying attention, he is looking out the window, holding the quill up and a drop of ink falls to the desk, splatters, stains the wood.

 

Time in small villages is a strange beast. It starts and stops. It stutters forward so three days are a blur then suddenly three hours are a life time. Regardless of the speed it is always surefooted. Even if there are days with frost, which seems early, or days with a rare last-of-the-year warmth, it is surefooted. Winter is approaching and everything will look dead and dull and London Town will be empty and only these merchant children will be there to occupy themselves. In this small village winter will be even more dull. Sicily keeps a keen eye on her brother and waits with baited breath for the first night of his inevitable failure. She occasionally speaks with Cutler Beckett since there are no other young people around with education and manners.

 

A morning:

Cutler and Sicily find themselves without occupation. George cannot be out of bed before eleven and the rest of the household is uncomfortable and so elsewhere. Sicily, though the younger of the two siblings, feels the onus of stewardship upon her. She must Entertain.

'How fairs the Company?' She asks.

'Well. Father sends me updates. Leake is to arrive in Gibraltar soon.'

She tilts her head. Gibraltar? I thought your business would be in the Indies.

'Oh, well we supply the Navy with saltpeter and powder. I sold some to them and father is keeping me updated on the progress. Part of learning the trade, I suppose.' He doesn't say that his father has ripped a hole in the paper because he is convinced that four hundred tons isn't enough for a siege and how Cutler is risking Company business with the Navy, a secured and sure thing, by selling to African traders. This is a pebble in the proverbial boot of the father-son relationship. One of the many pebbles. He sighs. 'He's very exacting.'

'Fathers usually are. Especially when they have high expectations.'

'Your father isn't. Well, at least with George he's not.'

She stares at him for a long moment. Politely pours them both more tea. Ah, he nods. I see. I hadn't realized it was so...that is, I had always thought George to be exaggerating their rift.

'It's very good of you to have got him this job.'

'Father says he must be sober for it. That's the trick.'

'Well, between the two of us I am sure we will manage it.' She smiles, then. Carefully. Perhaps, for a moment, it is calculated.

Later, as they set themselves up for an afternoon of cards and old, repeated gossip, Beckett thinks that there might be something afoot with Sicily always here and her mother away so only the old woman's companion is in the room. Always on the other side of it sewing. Or painting a table. Or reading a bible. Or a book of poetry. Or writing a letter. Not paying attention to them, being the evient point.

  
  
Even later, he tells his suspicions to George as they take a turn in the gardens for something to do.

'I wouldn't surprised, old thing.' George snorts. 'My mother is a puppet master. I'm half convinced she planned this healthy trip to the countryside two years ago and it's been a slow work driving me to drink-'

'No one drives you to drink but yourself.'

'True, but allow me the wishful thinking that this is my mother's long term wellness plan for me. Wear me down, build me back up. It's like the army only worse because she's my mother.'

Beckett snorts, whacks a bush with his cane. They stop and admire the sunset. It is lacklustre but seems the thing to do at such a moment.

'Can you manage moderation when we return to London?'

'For yours and Sicily's sake? I suppose I must.' George frowns, plucks Beckett's sleeve so they turn back to the path arm in arm. 'I've a confidence I must bestow upon you.'

'Oh no.'

'You know that skirt I rutted while you were with that dead chap?'

'Locke. John Locke the philosopher. Yes, I recall.'

'She wrote to me. Don't give me that look. She fancies herself in love. What's worse, she fancies herself with child. Mine. Stop looking at me like that. Just because no one's come forward with your brood of bastards doesn't give you the right to be saintly about it.'

'I was doing no such thing.'

The evening is chilly and Beckett motions towards the house. Let us go, he says. We can have a nice chat over tea about this problem of yours.

Inside they sneak through the halls to an abandoned corner of the house and barricade themselves in a room once the fire is going. Tea has been procured and placed on a table between them. George asks, Perhaps a stiffner? Beckett replies, No. Not till London. A sigh. A scowl. Slave-driver, George mutters. Beckett rolls his eyes. This girl, he prompts. This lady who is with child.

George sits on a settee with blankets piled about him. He confesses, 'I don't know how it happened.'

'When a woman and man love each other very much-'

'Sod off, Cutler.'

Beckett holds his hands up, peace, peace. I'll behave. Tell me your woes.

Ultimately, after George reads the letter aloud and bemoans ever having made the bet to begin with, he wants to know: What do I do? Send her some money to see someone? How do you know who to see? That is a woman's matter, I shouldn't think. They have their ways. Witchcraft, if I believed in that nonsense. Or do I own it? Legitimize it? Mother will be heart broken. Sicily will be...not scandalized in the least but she will pretend to be. Father will continue to believe he is right in his constant threats to cut me off. Might actually do it, too.

'You are assuming she's right. I've heard these things are hard to tell. Sometimes they're wrong. Women's bodies are difficult things. Sometimes they think they've a child and they do not. Liza says Mother suffered from the problem.'

'Oh God and Jesus, I'm too young to be a father.'

'You're twenty four. You're hardly a child. Marry her? That seems the logical route. Her family, who are they? Does she have brothers?'

'They are of no consequence. Wealthy, I suppose, her father has been knighted. A country knight. A hedge knight. And no, no brothers.'

'This knighted father, hale?'

'Elderly and infirm.'

'Cousins?'

'Yes. Several. But I'm not sure they'd want to make this public with them calling me out or anything. God, why did I do this? Why did I bed her? She wasn't even that good. For the love of God stop looking affronted.'

'I'm not looking affronted. I'm scoffing.'

They sit in silence. The fire crackles and George buries himself deeper into the blankets. Maybe, he thinks, if I go to sleep and wake up this will never have happened and she will never have written to me and it all will just disappear. He squeezes his eyes shut. Opens them. Finds Cutler standing by the fire reading the letter. After a moment his friend smiles. It's the small fleeting one that he gives when he's pleased with himself.

'Deny it.'

'What?'

'Say you were never with her. You never wrote her verses of any kind, poetic or otherwise. Deny you ever received the letter. It's her word against yours. It'll be a scandal but not one you cannot weather.'

'Seems a bit harsh.'

'Well, it's that or you give her money to take care of it or you marry her.'

'Perhaps I could give her money and then deny it?'

Beckett shrugs. Sure, I suppose. It'd be more to cover up if she did come forward but not an absurd amount. George, standing with a yawn, declares that he will think on. Sleep on it. Decide in the morning. With a shake of Cutler's hand he shuffled down the hall, blanket draped about his shoulders. An elderly king off to survey his lands.

Left alone by the fire Beckett reassess the letter in his hand. He considers the flames, lingers for a moment reading a line there, a line here, then drops it in. In seconds it is ash.

After all, he thinks, George's reputation is worth more than this girl's. Her family isn't anyone important. It'll pass, as these things do.

Leaving the room a hand catches his arm and he turns to face Sicily.

'Hullo-'

'Take me to her.'

'What?'

'When we return to London you will take me to this girl of George's.' Her grip is like iron. Her eyes remind him of ice. She is the cold one, he thinks. I sometimes forget that, then I remember and it is always a shock. It ought not to be. 'I am not a fool like either of you.'

'And what will I get in return?'

A smile. That one from before. Which is distant, calculating, but pleasant in a bejeweled sort of way. 'I foresee us helping each other out in the future. Trust me, Mr Beckett, there will be a time when I think we will be of great aid to the other. Or, in the language of merchants which this nations seems to be constantly translating into, I will owe you a favour and it is just good business.'

Letting go she is gone. The next morning he touches his arm where she had taken hold. Yes, he sighs, the conversation was real. What is that line from the Bard? When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

 

\---

 

It is easy to assume that a coven is three women.

 

\---

 

A handful of Habsburg officers are caught, tried for treason, court martial-ed, hanged like dogs. The British officers Hesse has put in jail. He wrings his hands for a moment then throws a book across the room. He is volatile. He is losing. He is a man who hates having his back in a corner and is lashing out at all and sundry.

'Your shadow is back, I see.' Hesse snarls at Mercer. Behind Mercer Hans grins stupidly. He has learned several new English words which he sprinkles between his Dutch and German. In private he tells the Mancunian, 'I think Hesse is a right _cunt._ '

'Where did you pick up that word?'

'Admiral Leake.'

Mercer rolls his eyes, tries to not smirk, fails, shoves the boy out his door. 'Piss off, then. Find me some solid proof for the officers. The English ones. Leake and Hesse want something that will make them swing.'

'Won't they anyway? Swing like laundry in the wind.' Hans makes hand motions, his body sways side to side.

'Not without firm proof. Now go; spy for me.'

Hans nods, Sure, boss, I'll spy, I'll spy, but you better pay me good. I've been to the dungeons here and pew, they smell.

Mercer calls him back, 'wait.' Hans waits. 'How'd you get here before Leake's ship?'

'Magic.' The boy snaps his fingers. Grins. His missing teeth visible.

'And luck.'

'Course. Lots of that.' Hans shrugs then adds, before he takes his final leave, 'I like working for you more than Leake. Leake is a mean cunt. Like Hesse only more so. You, no. Nasty...wanker? Nasty wanker. But not mean.'

'I'll take that as a compliment.'

'Do.'

'You've gotten taller. No longer as small as a mite. Maybe a tiny mouse.'

Hans bows. 'I ate like an English king. Now, I spy like a nasty English wanker. I'll fit right in when I move to London to make my fortune.'

'Christ's blood, don't do that.' But the boy has disappeared and Mercer is speaking to air.

 

 

Church brings a bottle of ale and stale bread, declares it a feast. They lay it out on the floor since at some point chairs had been confiscated for fortification purposes. Also, firewood. 'We've made it to December, God help us. Now, soon, we're going to be eating sawdust instead of flour.'

'It's already a quarter that.' Mercer sniffs the loaf. 'Easily.'

'Bugger, oh well. And I paid two bob for this from someone who is probably disreputable. Stop smirking, I know everyone here is disreputable, God almighty. Still, he seemed worse than the rest of us.'

They eat in silence. Church eyes the book in Mercer's lap. The author's name is visible, John Ray, although the letters mean little to Church. The Lancashire-man catches his gaze, tosses the book over, says it's the third time he's read it but there's nothing new to be had here.

'Didn't know you were a man of science,' Church says as he flips through the book. Between paragraphs are images of plants, little diagrams here and there.

'I'm not.'

The book is tossed back, Yorkshire-man gives Lancashire-man a look, leans in smirking, 'right, just as you weren't a soldier before coming to Gibraltar and you aren't a sailor even though I have reason to believe you have been and you only speak Flemish and English even though that is manifestly untrue.' A kiss. 'And you don't care a fig for your daughter even though you write her letters -'

'I never send them.'

'Doesn't matter.' Another kiss, he's climbing into Mercer's lap the best he is able. Difficult when he is taller and wider. 'And you don't care a fig for me either even though I'm fairly certain you are the reason I'm not in jail with the other British officers.'

'It was a fools mission, that plot. I told you.'

Suddenly Church withdraws. There is to be a flogging in the morning, he remembers, Milton-the-shop-keeper's-son. Seventy lashes to make a point. He remembers that Milton had been kind to him and promised to help him when they returned to England.

When they returned to England.

Sighing he sits back on his heels, Mercer watches. They are regarding each other in silence. Church thinks, When did it come to this? I am not certain of him, of anything about him. He cannot admit that it has always been so. Since when did his lover ever confide anything resembling truth? He cannot think it because such and admission would be too much and although he does not have the words of a poet he believes he understands emotions as well as any man possibly can and when he kisses Mercer again he thinks, God help me I'm in love. I want to tell him but I am so afraid he will laugh at me. I am so afraid he will scorn me and send me away and think little of me.

Mercer, pulling the bigger man on top of him, leaning back so Church is straddling his hips and looking torn between something and something. He wonders what the other man is thinking, with those soft eyes of his, with those young, childish beliefs of his. Perhaps, Mercer thinks, in another time this might have worked out. But as it is, I will be leaving soon and he will most assuredly be staying and will probably die. Shame, that.

 

 

Hesse to Mercer, You will oversee the transfer of the English officers back to London. Two of Leake's ships are returning. You will be on one of them.

Mercer to Hesse, Anything else, sir?

Hesse, I have a list of names of potential traitors. Have a gander at the English side. Pick one or two names. Only one or two, I can't string up my army.

Mercer does take a gander. He sees 'John Church' towards the bottom. It is McKilney's hand. Church who knows the entire thing was a setup, now, but cannot bring himself to say it because he is kindhearted and doesn't want it to be true. Church who is very comfortable and lovely and it's all rather sickening. Church who likes to hold him when he wants to sleep even though Mercer has told him repeatedly that he cannot sleep when someone is that close to him. Church who has fire-red hair and freckles. He looks up, 'Wentworth is one.' Hesse nods. The names stare up at one. 'Damon. Harry Damon.'

Hesse takes the list back. 'No one else?'

'No, sir.'

'And these are the best names to choose?'

'Yes, sir.'

Hesse leans back, rests his hands on his stomach. His wig is large and his coat a very bright red. It makes him look both bilious and larger than reality. 'Friendships formed in war are always the hardest to loose.'

'Sir.'

'You're leaving in two days.'

Exiting the office Hans is waiting for him the shadows.

'Want to go to London?' He asks it before he can stop himself. His skin feels itchy. He tells himself that cold Atlantic water, dark and deep, and harsh sea air will cure him of whatever it is that he is feeling. Hans it looking at him as if he is made of gold.

Does the lad want to go? By the virgin Mary's womb does he! By the prick of Saint Joseph! Mercer whaps him on the head and says that he will have to mind his language because London, city though it may be, is not a city under siege.

'Londoners can speak Dutch?' The boy wonders aloud.

'No. Well, some can. But it's the principle of the matter.' This is said in English and Hans blinks up at him. He shakes his head, only caught a word or two. Mercer repeats in Dutch. Hans grins and beats a fist into a palm.

'I'm going to learn English and then I will make my fortune.'

'God speed to you, lad. We're leaving in two days.'

The boy, unable to contain excitement, is bouncing at his side. He asks, How much of London will I be able to see? When I was there for the Prince I only saw very little. Just the docks and some offices. How big is London, truly? Is it bigger than Amsterdam? Are the women pretty, I don't remember noticing them. He doesn't understand women, yet, since he is ten, but knows it is something he should ask. Will I get to meet your daughter? The one with the French name? Does she speak Dutch, like you? Because I don't speak French. He doesn't stop until Mercer deposits him outside the door to the room Hans shares with a few other young boys. As he leaves he can hear Hans yelling, 'Fritz you mangy cur, where are you? I'm going back to London and you're not!'

 

 

The room is dark and cool and the bed is empty. Mercer takes out his rucksack and looks about the room. There are a few books, writing supplies, a few odds and ends, a spare shift, a greatcoat hanging in the corner, a musket by the window with powder and shot, a spare stiletto hidden by the makeshift desk. He decides he can pack later. Picking up a leaf of paper he begins to write a letter to his sister Anne and, by-proxy, to Lisette.

The door opens. Quietly. So it's not Hans who manages to turn everything into a parade when he's excited.

'You're leaving.'

Mercer turns around and sees Church standing on the threshold. He is holding his hat and wears an uncertain expression.

'I am. Two days. Taking the officers back to London for trial.'

Church waits.

'I'm taking Hans with me. He's useful to have around. If a bit trying.'

Church waits some more.

'Are you going to come in or go out?'

The bigger man decides to come in. The door closes and suddenly he is lost because he cannot think of what to say or do and Mercer is sitting still and poised and is watching him so carefully.

'Are you writing to your daughter?'

'My sister.'

'Are you actually going to send this one?'

'Yes.'

They remain at an impasse. Mercer can read Church's face, that foremost question of, Why are you not taking me? Stands between them. Rising from the chair he crosses and is about to reach for Church but then stops because he knows that when times are difficult he doesn't like to be touched so thinks maybe Church won't want to be.

Church does. He lunges forward, wraps big arms around Mercer, practically engulfs the other man. Then, holding him tightly, stands very still for a long moment. Slowly, only very slowly, does he let go. Mercer raised his hands to push away but Church wont let him so he settles for dropping his arms again and looking at the red haired man's expression with bemusement.

'Going to miss me?'

'Yes. Of course. It'll only be me and McKilney left.'

'Find new friends, you've a talent for it.'

Now, Church lets him push away, turn back to the desk and the unfinished letter.

'I always meant to ask, how did you manage to get digs all on your own? I've got to share with three other men. They all snore. Johnson is the worst.'

Mercer snorts, shrugs, says he has luck with this sort of thing. Except when he's traveling in England. Then he gets stuck sharing a bed with five other large, smelly, loud men.

'Will you write to me when you've gone?'

'You can't read.'

'I'll appreciate it anyway.'

A sigh. We'll see. I might write them then never send them. I'm known for that, you know. Church laughs, leans in and kisses him, says they might as well spend the last two days being happy. Or, he gives Mercer a sly look, reasonably self satisfied since you never like to call yourself happy.

'I don't enjoy leaping to grand conclusions about the state of my own reality.'

'You say really big things, sir. Now stop that and come to bed. You can do your weird educated thing at me later.'

 

\---

 

When they say goodbye Church smiles and pats Mercer's cheek. Says they'll have to get a pint when he returns to England. And hey, at least there's saltpeter and artillery now? Even if it's not enough. Mercer replies, Sure. I know a good place in London. Look me up when you get back. Don't get shot, eh, bad for your health.

They part ways. Mercer to a waiting ship and thinks to himself, This is the last I will ever see of him. Church to a city under siege and thinks to himself, It'll be good to see his stupid face again after it's all over, that beautiful, lying bastard.

 

\---

 

What is space? A mode through which time can be expressed. A way of creating understanding. Here, let me present a story and the story needs a setting or it is meaningless. The story unfolds on a ship as it speeds across the Atlantic, back to Lisbon then from Lisbon to England. It lands at Portsmouth. There is firm country ground, now. A reality that is not fleeting in the way space and time are on a ship. Mercer disembarks and looks around. Behind him prisoners are being lined up to be transferred to their military superiors. Mercer sighs. England, he thinks, what a miserable sad island. God I missed it.

The confinement of the siege is gone. The confinement of the ship is leaving, slipping from his shoulders and his cannot help but openness. No towering heaps of rock, no walls, no fortifications. Just space and land and a sky that dives downward towards earth and if you peer into the distance it seems endless. That is what he wants. What he craves. Oh yes, London must be returned to. It is the Rome of England, all roads lead there. It has a weight, a pull, that ancient city. Tides push you out then yank you back, sometimes so fast your feel fall out from under you and suddenly you are drowning and London's weight is sinking you into marshy mire. But before London, maybe a visit to the countryside. Any village will do. They're all sort of the same after a time.

After the transfer is completed and he has handed off Hesse's letters to the right people Hans asks, Where to now?

'Out of Portsmouth. I need to see some rolling English countryside before we go to London.'

'So you can record English plants like that man in your book?'

'No. So I don't feel like I'm being driven insane. Then, yes, we'll go to London. Hesse gave me a letter of introduction to some East India gentleman. One of those little company lords only he's not a lord.'

Hans doesn't understand but remains quiet. He is too busy looking at strange English houses and strange English clothes.

'Ever heard of a William Beckett?' Mercer asks. Hans shakes his head. 'No, me neither.'

 

\---

 

'You said you would fetch me the moon and a necklace of stars,' Miss Katherine Haywood says.

'I fear-'

'You said you loved me madly and to distraction.'

'Well-'

'You said that I was your sun and moon and stars and the movement of earth under your feet and the necessary tide of the ocean. You said-'

'Oh dear-'

'Tell me truthfully, do you love me?'

'Miss Haywood, look-'

'Tell me.'

'Miss Haywood, I do declare-'

'Mr Stanhope.'

'Here's some money. I think it'll be enough. There are things you can buy. I've heard of them. Savin and Worm Fern or Madder or Pennyroyal. There are things you can buy, you see, to get it off. Assuming it's mine, of course.'

A sharp intake of breath but Miss Haywood takes the money. It sits in her lap in a small bag and it feels very heavy. She is looking at a painting behind George's head. It's a pastoral scene. A small boy with an upturned basket of apples, green ones, and a puppy at his feet. She wants to cry.

George stands, his hat is in his hands, he shifts from foot to foot. The room feels hot despite it being a cold December day. Miss Haywood's eyes are glistening in firelight. Her hair is in braids and piled upon her head with little pearls weaved throughout it. She is wearing a dark green dress. There are flowers upon it but pricked in silver, not gold. Miss Haywood looks at him, it pierces his heart. That look. He has seen it before and never knows what to do when it is directed at him. That look of anger and disappointment. Of confusion and hurt and frustration. Out of all of the emotions she sends him, through this psychic connexion of their eyes meeting and that empty, filled space between, it is disappointment which hurts the most. A mad thought occurs to him, Would the baby have her eyes or mine?

'Good day, sir.' She whispers it. He bows, reaches for her hand but she shrinks away from him, into her chair and so he leaves. Beckett stands as well, the ever present silent onlooker.

'I'll take my leave, madam.' He bows and sweeps from the room. They can be heard clattering down the hall then there is silence.

Sicily remains. Carefully she reaches over and takes the money from Katherine's lap.

'You have a choice, Miss Haywood.'

The girl is stricken.

'You can take this money and do as my brother suggested. No one will be the wiser. Perhaps you will take ill for a week, but it is December and so that is hardly uncommon. If you choose this path I know a woman who can help you. She is very discreet and kind, in her way. A Mrs Anne Williams. Over near Fleet Street. It's not a nice area of town-'

Shrilly, 'it's where I ought to be! Fleet street! Covent Garden! Drury lane! Charring cross! The Strand – where else are they? Those sorts of women. The fallen doves as they're called.' Then, she laughs. Gasping, shrill, mad laughing but her eyes are bright in the light. Bright and wet but tears are blinked back. Slowly she composes herself. Sicily waits, watches. Katherine, hugging her middle, her stomach, is distant. She is present, but only half of her is in the room.

'You do not belong there. My brother is a cad. I will be the first to say this and my dear had I known what he was about I would have done something. But, as it is, it is too late for regrets.'

'What do you know of this?'

'Nothing. Except two things, I know what it is to be lied to in love. I know what it is to believe yourself the happiest woman on earth with some understanding of the future and then to have the floor crumble away and only blackness staring at you. I know what it is to not be certain about anything. And the second, I know that I want to keep my family name clean. I suspect you wish for something similar.

'So, you have a choice. My brother will not marry you, that you can be sure of. If you choose to keep the child and retire to the countryside, as your parents will expect of you, my brother will send money for the babe. He will do that much but no more. Miss Haywood, I do not pretend to understand what you are going through right now. But I do know that you must make a choice and should you choose Mrs Williams or to give the babe away I am able to help. But so help me, should you make a public claim upon my brother's honour I will burn this house to the ground around you and your child. My brother is not a good person, mostly though selfish carelessness. I am not a good person out of necessity.' Standing she hands the money back. It is heavy. It is a weight. It sinks into the folds of the girl's gown. 'Just say a word and I will leave or stay, come or go.'

Katherine looks up to her, she blinks rapidly, her cheeks are blotchy, there is crimson rising from her chest up her neck. Her lips purse. 'Your family is a curse,' she whispers. 'Please go.'

Sicily nods, gives a curtsey, leaves. The door closes and only then she can hear the girl weep.

 

 

George bellows, 'You did what?'

'I offered to help her.'

'I didn't want you to.'

'Stop pointing. It's rude. And why do you think I came along?'

'I don't know. To watch me squirm. To see my shame. God help me, Sicily, you are no kind person. You never have been.'

Beckett discreetly skirts the edge of the room, heading towards the door.

George continues, 'Did you tell Miss Haywood all of my sins? Did you confess on my behalf to her? Did you tell her of Charlotte and Mol and Kitty and Anne and Lizzie and Mary? Did you spread my life's secrets to this slip of a girl in a sick attempt at helping her?'

'You are no more kind than I am, George. At least I do not pretend to be some sort of angel with a golden halo.'

'You are not to interfere in my business!'

'Because you handle your business so well, brother-mine. What was Mr Beckett supposed to do about it? He is just as useless as you in this situation. I told her who to go to. She will see it done.' Sicily turns, her hands are clenching at her skirts and she lifts them as she walks to the door. Beckett scoots away from her and finds himself trapped between siblings, his back against the wall. He is thankful he and Elizabeth never have altercations like this. It makes him shudder. The yelling. The frantic gesticulations. The cold looks. 'Good evening, brother. Good evening, Mr Beckett.'

When it settles, the imaginary dust, the shattered calm of the falling of the year, Beckett sinks into a chair.

'Well,' he murmurs. 'That all could have gone more smoothly.'

'Shut up,' George snarls. He is a bear stalking about. His shoulders hunched, hands jamed into coat pockets. 'You helped her set it all up.'

Beckett pours himself a brandy and waits until George has finished pacing. He says, as gently as he can manage, You have to admit, your sister handles these things with discretion and tact.

George eyes his friend, deflates. 'Perhaps, perhaps. And it is a woman's concern. These matters. They know all sorts of trickery for it.' He is convincing himself. He is thinking of ways to apologize to Sicily in order to make the Christmas-tide season pass in some semblance of peace. He looks to Beckett, motions to the decanter. 'I'll have a glass.'

'No you won't. For you it'll be twelve glasses. I know how you work, George Stanhope.'

George glares but says no more.

It begins to snow an early snow. 


	7. Chapter 7

A Sunday service is read in two different parishes. One, marked well and attended by many, is in London Town with ladies wearing fine fabrics and men in suits with coats and hats and everything that is beautiful and rich. Another, less well marked and attended by only those of the village where all are wearing their finest clothes which are old, worn, washed out, faded. A boy, in a whispering shout asks, What is the priest man saying? A man, murmurs, Nothing of any import. Be quiet.

In London Town a young man yawns, tics an X into a square and passes the paper over to his friend. The sermons are different. The hymns chosen are different. Mercer remembers his mother telling him once upon a time of an England with no music and no dancing and no Christmas. He thinks it was a fine thing that hearty, hale King Charles returned. He thinks that although he is not a joyful or happy man by nature he could not abide a country that was as dour as he is.

 

The men of the church, both in village and city, look out over their congregation and say that this is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God: 'And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth'.

 

'Well,' Beckett sighs afterwards. 'Wasn't as depressing as last week's.'

'Are you sure, Cutler?'

'Quite. “When they fast, I will not hear their cry; and when they offer burnt offering and an oblation, I will not accept them: but I will consume them by the sword, and by the famine, and by the pestilence?”'

George snorts, owns it true. When did church become so dark? William Beckett tells both young men that it has always been so. Only, now, they're old enough to learn the lessons and so are finding them uncomfortable. Church, he says, isn't supposed to be _fun._

Later, Beckett explains his father and mother to George and Sprat. Father, he says, met mother at one of those Quaker meetings up country. They've been fanatical ever since.  


 

 

Mercer looks out over the Fens. Hans has disappeared himself into the local village for sustenance and will be found later, when Mercer is done with the wild and the soaking, wet land before him.

When the Romans first came to this island they found it dense and dark and filled with water. Water, the most destructive of elements. It erodes, washes away, disappears solid rock from the earth, ends fire, fills in space. The Romans washed upon the shores of Britannia. Rubbed away at fickle resistance. Insisted upon their dominance. Somewhere up north in what was called Caledonia there is a golden eagle hidden. Rotting away in mud and earth. The Romans might claim fire and war as theirs but water is perhaps more accurate. You know when water once covered a land. Its imprint is forever remembered. You know when the Romans carved their forever bloody roads into an unwilling countryside. Their imprint is forever remembered. Currently, the water is creeping back. Reclaiming drained lands. It ignores Civil War and protectorate and revolution and revolt. The land and the water, as it stands now in late 1704, will not be claimed by king or countrymen no matter how many horses and how many men try to take the water from the land again.

 

As always, a tide turns under English soil and Mercer finds himself heading along the inevitable road towards London Town. Hans hops along excitedly at his side. They will be there in a matter of days and the boy is tired of the empty expanse, the yawning gaping grasping expanse of English countryside. In the boy's pocket is a small white flower, a violet easily trampled underfoot, and uncommon in this cold season. He cradles it when his hands go into his coat and tells himself that he does not miss the canals and waterways of his home.

 

 

George grins at Cutler. You want to go out tonight? There's a good tavern on Grub street we can start out at. Nice and lowly but with a jolly group of nutter poets flitting about. Then who knows? Find a woman or two.

'The last time you found a woman you got her pregnant.'

'No, no that was the last time I found a lady. I'm sworn off ladies. Skirts on the other hand, fallen doves, they don't cause as much hassle. I've got a booklet, let's see there's a Ms Hathaway who costs ten shillings and it says here that she is fiery and offers more for less if you buy her a few rounds of ale.' He scans down the list. 'Miss Jean something near Lambeth, she is a full pound but apparently worth it. Dark eyed and haired, older but has put her years to good use. That would suit you Cutler, eh? You like older, dark haired and mysterious women.'

'I'm not going whoring with you, George. I've work to do.'

George sits back and watches his friend for a moment before muttering, By Jove you mean it don't you? Well, there's a thing!

'You've work to do, too.' A stack of papers shifted themselves across the desk. 'Welcome to the EIC where evenings out and flippant times go to die.'

'You can't mean it Cutler.'

'You wanted a job. This is your job. We have to get this lot sorted by Friday and like hell am I going to sit through yet another of my father's lectures filled with vague references to that Ecclesiastes verse about how there is a time for everything followed by his obsession with I Corinthians.'

'I Corinthians?'

'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.'

'Ah.' Gingerly George picks up a leaf of paper. 'But it's past dinner.'

'Indeed.'

'I can't do translation past diner.'

Cutler looks up, over the stack between them. Upon his face is writ an expression into which George reads the line of: then get yourself gone and find a new job.

'You're a harsh task master.'

'You'll thank me for it when you can look your father in the eye. Now, here are all the French missives we've intercepted in chronological order. Newest on the top. You know the deal.'

 

           

 _Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal._ Or ought it to be something else? _I hate and love. And why, perhaps you’ll ask._ _I don’t know: but I feel, and I’m tormented._

 

In the early hours of the morning Beckett is lying with his face in his pillow and thinking: _though I see through the glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known._

What ever that means.

He rolls over, stares up at the canopy. Hidden in a false drawer in his desk is a new little book of dirty ditties. This one from a printer off Grub street and it has pictures drawn, in case the imagination wasn't working for the reader. He tells himself that he is not so base as to resort to self-abuse in this way. There are houses he can go to with men in corsets and skirts and he can at least pretend they are women and doesn't that make it better? Sprat had once said that sodomites were the lowest class of sinful, the lowest order of evil. But Sprat is well married and with a babe in the crib and a lordship looming in the not-so-distant-future. And Beckett reasons that he can't be a full sodomite for he _has_ slept with women and it wasn't terrible. He'd do it again. When he feels like it. He supposes he might. And he'll marry, of course. This, he thinks, will fix everything. I will take a wife and then maybe a mistress and all will be well. I won't think of those dirty poems or those dirty drawings and I won't go to Lambeth or St Giles or Cripplegate or anywhere else that they sell such filth. Both written and living.

The night turns to dawn. The morning sun creeps in through veils, around the edges of curtains, stains the floor gold and finds Master Cutler on his side, still awake but wishing he were dead.

 

           

In 1698 the Palace of Whitehall burned to the ground.

This is the memory that is conjured when Mercer is shown into the office of William Beckett. The company lord-non-lord is seated, enthroned, in bureaucratic beauty. Parliament is calling for East India Company blood, there has been a scandal in India with someone involved in the Bombay Presidency. But there is always scandal in trade for trade is a dirty, filthy thing and no man in it can be honest. Even honest men are dishonest simply by believing they are honest. This is not under discussion, though. Neither man is thinking of John Gayer, imprisoned in Surat, nor Nicholas Waite who is conspiring with the New Company against the Old (London, East India Company as commonly known) Company.

No, Mercer is thinking of a palace burning. Of the heat. Of what it must have been like for those inside. Of dying with the eyes of dead King Henry VIII staring down at you. Of watching cold marble sweat, turn hot, glow red. A pagan funeral pyre. Everyone dying together. A prophetess had once pointed to Henry VIII and had declared that when the king died dogs would lick his blood from the frigid, infertile ground. For the men and women in the palace there was no prophetess but the flames were the dogs and they were licking dead Henry's oiled face and probably people's shoes were melting and their clothes were smoking and their skin beginning to boil and blister and burst. Good Christians burning the way Patrocleus burned. Burning the way Norse gods burned. Hot and bright and stunning. How had it come to this?

And where was Mercer while people burned? Across the river and drinking from a flask watching as the old government maze consumed itself. He remembers wondering if good king William was watching. Or was he too busy buggering one of his court favourites? Possibly both, very probably both. Never let it be said that the Dutch king of England couldn't multitask.

Not-yet-Queen Anne had probably been watching. Watching and wearing a pretty, white satin dress and twisting a handkerchief between her pretty white fingers. She was probably feeling angry. Maybe Sarah Churchill was with her. Lingering in the background with her porcelain smile and spidery fingers. Dead sister Mary had certainly been watching from the shadows. A shade within darkness with her sad smile and their sisterly hatred.

Mercer had held his flask up and toasted the fiery London skyline. Happy birthday to me. Happy thirty-something fucking years in God's not-very-green world. Such as they have been.

 

Back in the present, with William Beckett enthroned before him and his young look-alike son scowling in a corner, Mercer reasons that perhaps it had been a bit of an excessive route to kill just one man. Henriette, not yet dead and who had hardly been innocent in the act, might have agreed. Perhaps. Henriette had enjoyed the city _en alarum,_ though, a tintinnabulation of bells. And their daughter? Three years old, held in a lap, touching his face with childish fingers. Mentally, he finishes the flask and walks into the brouhaha of London city proper.

In all of this what is William Beckett thinking? Nothing much, perhaps a fleeting recollection of his childhood, a mental note about dinner with a young man named Johnson that night, a memory of his wife hidden away in obscure countryside. He thinks to himself as he takes the man's letter of introduction, Maybe I should visit her. I've not seen her in months.

'The prince says you are literate, well organised, clean in your habits and a hard worker. He also says you know, aside from English, Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish and French.' The elder Beckett sets the paper down. 'Any others I should know of?'

'Punjabi, Bengali, and I can understand a very little of Nahuatl.'

'Never heard of the last one.'

'A language from New Spain, sir.'

'All right. Any other skills I should know of?'

'I did some survey work in the colonies, mainly coastline and rivers but I think I could manage interior surveying tolerably. I also served as a personal secretary for a merchant in Plymouth for a few years.'

'Why did you leave?'

'Personal disagreement, sir.'

Beckett nods slowly, picks up the letter and rereads it. Picking up another paper he hands it over. He says, Translate this for me. Just the gist of it. Mercer does so. The older man, satisfied, leans back into his chair. 'Do you know why the company supports men of natural philosophy, letters and languages?'

'No, sir.'

'It is a theory of mine that I've convinced others to play along with which is this: in order to control a population you first must understand them, their languages, their cultures and so on. Then, you must become the sole holder and provider of legitimate knowledge. Is anything produced by a native in Surat or Bombay worth reading? No. Probably not. But, under tutelage and guidance, they can be made better. Do you know that they have no accurate, logical history? Well, the Muslims do but among un-Christian peoples they are the most like us. The Hindus, on the other hand, do not and they have the audacity to feel that they need not one. It is the Hindus who are in the direst need of advancement and we are there to provide it them, but first we must assess them and see where advancement is needed.'

'And trade?'

'Hm?'

'Trade. Pepper, gunpowder, silk, spices...saltpeter.'

'Oh yes. Naturally. But that is merely a short-term view. That is what the Dutch are doing with their company, what the Portuguese did, and what the New company wants as well. Only trading posts. I think we can do better than that. Well, I will hire you for a trial period.' He glances down at Hans who grins back up. Mercer notices the young man in the corner frown and stare at the boy with a disconcerted look but it vanishes as he catches the older man's eye. 'This boy is?'

'My assistant. Hans. Very useful lad. Message running, that sort of thing.'

'Ah, well, I am sure we can find a place for him somewhere. He speak English?'

Mercer glances down at the boy, Well, a pigeon English, sir. But he improves daily. It's a little rough at the moment.

William leans over, resting his arms on his desk. Speak, he commands the boy. Tell me about the weather.

Hans peers at William for a long moment, gives a hurried look to Mercer then cautiously, 'it's bleeding cold as Hades' tits outside, sir.'

Mercer's face has no expression written upon it. William thinks he'd hire the man for that performance alone.

Encouraged Hans adds, 'and I'll say that though it's warmer in Spain there aren't as many scurvy cunts trying to shoot ye. Not hearing canon balls is a right good thing.'

William holds up a hand, cease. Desist. That is enough. Scurvy cu-- where did the boy learn this language? Soldiers and sailors, no doubt. Well, he'll have to clean it up but can play mute until it occurs. And you, William's hand lands back on the desk and his attention is squarely on the man in front of him. You will be starting tomorrow. Early. You will work with my son, Cutler, who is in charge of relays and the organisation of our legion of botanists, natural philosophers, linguists, and other learned men.

From the shadows the young man steps forward. He bows to Mercer. Mercer returns the complement.

'Cutler, this is Mister Mercer, find a desk for him. I don't know what we'll do with the Dutch scrap.' Hans beams at him.

'Of course father. A pleasure, sir. Welcome back to England.'

Mercer inclines his head. The younger man wears an expression of mild disgust and Mercer isn't sure if it's permanent or merely the presence of Hans who hasn't had a proper bath in a month or two. Thin lips are raised in half a sneer. Eyes are bayonets. He's skewering Mercer with them.

 

 

George asks Cutler what he thinks of the new man working with them, or is it for them?, now. Cutler just scowls, Oh, he's trash. But trash that can speak a silly amount of languages. How does a man have time to learn so much? He can't be educated.

Well, George hums, with a face like that I doubt he's doing anything or anyone else. Lots of spare time I would wager.

Cutler sips his coffee. Around them the chatter in Nicholas' increases in volume. Stock traders are coming in for their daily coffee and are bringing work with them. Numbers are shouted across the room. A man sees the two company men and grins, 'How's the New Company treating you fellows of the Old Company? Feeling the heat of competition?'

Beckett sneers, politely, 'it's them you should be asking.'

'It's only I had heard about Gayer and Waite and something about Gayer being held in Surat against his will with his family and it all sounds a bit murky.'

'Perfectly clear to those who have the facts.'

'And do you? Have the facts? Parliament wants an inquiry, I hear tell.'

'If it comes to that we will answer them with honesty.' Beckett turns away, George rolls his eyes. The trader shrugs and goes back to his people. The noise continues.

 

Beckett is not harsh on the new hire. He's simply intent on making sure this jumped-up-whatever is up to speed and capable of handling a difficult and stressful work environment. The new man doesn't seem to care what Beckett says or does. George philosophizes, Well he did just come back from war. I'm not sure you're as threatening as an entire regiment of bayonet wielding Spanish-men, Cutler.

'Am I not? I'll have to work on that, then.'

 

 

In a house on the other side of the river. The part of town good men wash their hands of, a young girl shoves her hair down onto her head. She holds onto it tight, is watching her reflection in a pool of water. After counting to twenty she lets go and it springs back up. This is going no where. She looks for her bonnet to hide the mess under, standing up in time to witness a carriage pull up alongside her home. Tying a bow under her chin and brushing off her hands she puts her head in through the open window.

'Auntie, there are ladies here for you.' She hollers in. In response a woman yells back that they should be shewn in then. 'But I'm with the geese, auntie!'

'Fine, fine. I'll be a moment.'

Lisette-Marie goes back to the poultry, picks up the bag of seed and continues feeding them. She is quiet, listening for the voices of those at the door. First she can hear her aunt Anne letting them in then only one woman replying to all the questions. Lisette finishes with the geese and chickens, wets her hands, rubs them off on her apron and scoots into the house. Hidden in the shadows are cousins, two older girls Mary and Tilly then a young boy of four who is Jimmy as he isn't big enough for breeches let alone his name. Lisette pinches his cheek then ducks in where Mary and Tilly stand. Mary frees Lisette's hair from the confines of the bonnet and begins picking through it with a comb. All the children are silent. The house grave and dark save for a fire in the front room where the women are.

They can overhear a conversation. A woman, Miss Haywood, and her friend whose name they cannot hear but who is doing all the speaking, are come for help. This is not unusual. Sally Parker from down the row once spat on the boots of Tilly and said that her mam was a witch and her cousin a changeling on account of her skin being black like coal. Tilly had smacked her and said her mam weren't no witch as witches hurt people and her mam makes people better so stands to reason she weren't a witch and Lisette is no changeling just her mam was from Haiti and, Tilly sticks her finger into Sally Parker's face, yer just from muddy Thames and yer dad's not actually yer dad.

Sally Parker cried to her father and mother and this brought hell down upon Tilly but the point remained, Anne Williams weren't no witch and Lisette-Marie Mercer weren't no changeling. Just a bastard, Mr Parker added once Mrs Williams had seen him out. Which she isn't sure is worse or not.

Miss Haywood would like to purchase tea. Lisette listens for what kind. Sometimes Uncle Joe is asked for, sometimes other plants and she isn't sure what they do. Mary had told her, 'they're for your cycle which you will get when you are older'. Lisette, Cycle? Like when you and Tilly sometimes have to stay abed for a day? Mary, Yes that's it. But it's not too bad for us. There's Kitty across the way who is in such pain she goes blind but it's only for two days for her. And then you bleed as well but there's sheep's wool and linens for that. Mary continued and explained that for her and Tilly, which always happens at the same time and maybe it will be the same for all three of us, there is only a day of discomfort then a few days of bleeding and the neighbourhood dogs will try and stick their noses _there_ and you have to shoo them off then it's all back to normal.

This, Lisette did not tell them, terrified her.

Miss Haywood, or rather Miss Haywood's friend of no name, is paying aunt Anne. She thanks Anne profusely and wishes her a good day. Anne replies that if they need more, because it's rather far along, come back to her and no one else. They'll give you pennyroyal oil, she mutters, and that is no good. No good at all. The children wait until the carriage has rattled away before emerging into the main room from their hiding place by the stairs. Lisette's hair is only half fixed and Tilly scolds her for moving away too soon.

'Will she be back, do you think?' Mary asks, discovering the pees she had been shucking before interruption.

Anne shrugs, Maybe. If you girls go and get yourself in that way before you're married do something about it sooner.

The girls give a chorus of 'yes ma'am'. Young Jimmy gums a wooden spoon, shrieks with delight when Lisette makes a face at him. Gurgles and toddles across the floor getting in everyone's way.

 

 

So, what do you do with the dead?

There was once a woman who wrote about a ship and a massacre and islands and the spaces between people, between land, between people and land and water and there was air and death and the dead and dying. They died.

What do you do with the dead?

As a nation, a city, full of the glorious and filthy, you bury them.

You stitch them up in canvas with a final notch through the nose to ensure that they are

                                    dead

and then you leave them so they rest ill in their ashen bones beneath damp earth, wine red waves. And if you give voice to them what is that but self indulgence because the dead do not chase the living.

 

 

Hans cannot read. The words are magic to him, they rearrange in front of his eyes, they scatter across the page forming diagonals and crosses and shapes impossible. No one, in his short life, has taken the time to help him with this. There is a letter on Mercer's desk in the company offices. It has a military seal on it and the handwriting of Prince George of Hesse-Darmstadt. Hans remembers the prince with his curls and curls and curls and powder on his wig until it got to a point in the siege when not even the prince was powdering his wig or wearing it, even. He wonders if it's still the case. Christmas is in a matter of days. What are the men doing, there? Cold and huddling together over thin fires while Mediterranean wind and winter rain beat down on them.

The letter he takes, looks about, finds only the posh scunner watching him. Scunner, being a word he learned from McKilney and uses with great joy as Mercer looks amused anytime he says it. But the posh scunner to Hans is the young, petit man with a round face and haughty eyes. Hans doesn't like him. He thinks that the posh man returns the sentiment. He smiles his gap-toothed smile. The letters have dispersed and are magic. He watches, he cannot focus, the paper is returned to the desk. Sitting himself on the floor he picks at his nails and waits until Mercer returns with tea. Then, maybe, he'll be given the afternoon off to wander city streets and throw pebbles into the muck of the Thames.

           

 

'You ought not leave the boy in here. He reads the papers on the desks.' Cutler Beckett declares without looking up.

'Oh?'

'He read one of yours.'

Mercer glances down at the open letter. Reads it again. Puts it away. Finds Beckett watching him.

'Bad news?'

'No. Merely expected news.'

'If it's personal it shouldn't be delivered to the offices.'

'It wasn't.'

'What was it about, then?'

'The war.'

'What about the war?'

George, late and clearly exhausted, enters the room, scoots across the open space between Beckett and Mercer, winces as both glare at him. He holds his hands up, What?

Mercer turns back to Beckett who is waiting.

'Just a follow up with some business I helped attend to while working for the prince.'

Beckett continues to wait. Mercer stares at him. George mutters, For the love of all that is holy it's too early for this.

the day passes. Beckett manages to filch the letter after tea. Finds only a list of names. They mean nothing to him. Prince George has a post script which says, _I hope this satisfies your inquiries. He died two weeks after your departure._

Beckett puts the letter back. Returns to his desk. Feels uncertain about something but isn't sure what.

 

Aristotle wrote that truth is defective in literary terms since it cannot always provide the acceptable succession of events that verisimilitude requires.

 

Sicily watches the younger woman prepare tea. Two separate pots. One unadorned, a symbolic representation of all that is unspeakable. The other is white with pink roses and gold leaf trim. It is very pretty. Sicily hates it. Of course her brother would go with a girl who likes pink roses and is wearing yellow in December as if that is any sort of acceptable way to act.

There ought to be a poem written about this. Not a dreadful satire, like Swift's new work, although this entire situation _is_ worthy of satire and derision. Perhaps that young man Hogarth might be more up to the task.

Sicily pours whiskey into her tea. The tea from the pretty little pot that a young girl-child might like. She hands the whiskey to the jaundicely dressed girl-woman before her.

'In case the pennyroyal doesn't take. I've heard consuming a lot of alcohol helps.'

Katherine takes it wordlessly. The decanter joins the realms of the unspeakable. Sicily wishes she hadn't mentioned it. Everything is so tawdry and torn, now. So grey and disgusting.

           

And what does Katherine Haywood dream of that night as she cries in pain, claws at the sheets, wakes to red-red-red-red and cannot bear her once white nightshift which is now red-red-red-red and her legs which are red-red-red-red. Cherry red. Bright red. Red-red-red. Then, darker wine red. Wine red like the sea. Liquid like the sea. Deadly like the sea. She does not think she cares much for the sea anymore. She wishes she were drowning. It would be easier. Her fingers. They are read. She remembers the Scottish play and laughs. Of course this is so funny. So hilarious. She's laughing and crying.

Then, then she is standing. It drips onto the floor. A steady drip till there is a pool of it. She wants to vomit. She does. Onto the floor.

Sicily comes in. Katherine says that things could be worse or tries to but can't on account of laughing and crying and the red and because it's everywhere and Sicily has her seated on fresh linens and out of her shift an into a new one – soon-to-be-red.

What does she dream of as she gulps in air and hiccups and tries to sleep as the older woman rubs her back? She dreams of the dead and what do you do with the dead but bury them.

 

 

Across the city Lisette wakes with a startled gasp. She lies awake and wonders if her father will come to visit her now that he has returned to London. Next to her the other children snore. It is cold but not too cold. She hopes he has brought her a present since the last time he went abroad he said he would but forgot. She falls asleep, lulled by the snores and breathing of her cousins. She is young and so does not dream. Or does, but will not remember it in the morning.

 

And her father? Mr. Mercer of the indiscernible Christian-name? Is he dreaming or awake and wishing for sleep? A little of both. On bad nights he will dream of water and small spaces. Or of grapeshot and shrapnel made from shattered limbs. When a canon ball hits one man his bones become weapons as they strike the men beside him, taking them away as well. After such nights it becomes more difficult to _be_ during the day. When the young Mr. Beckett slams books down on his desk Mercer jumps. Jolts. They glare at each other. The claustrophobic feeling of Company officers is unbearable as is the chaos of Nicholas' coffeehouse and the Stock Exchange and London in general. Horses and carts and the smells are all too much after bad nights. And then there is Mr. George Stanhope reading the daily updates from Gibraltar because he seems to think people want to know when can he not understand that the sound of musket-balls impacting flesh is dull, thudded, a soft yet sharp hit and he thinks about it over and over as the young man reads. These thoughts run together then scatter apart. George is done. Mercer thinks he is elsewhere – perhaps not Gibraltar but the Netherlands or France or India. Hans laughs at something. He lands back into his body. The words on the papers before him are beautiful Sanskrit. It is a map, crude, of the mouth of the river Ganges drawn up by an Indian man.

'There should be a proper survey of the continent,' he says to no one in particular. Young Mr. Beckett replies that they've gotten along fine without one thus far. He still glares at Mercer because he cannot think of another way to be around the man. Mercer wonders, not for the first time, if it is him personally that the young man is offended by, or is he like that to everyone? Or, maybe, he doesn't like Mercer's face the same way Mercer hadn't liked Foxe's face back in Spain. This takes him out of his body again.

War, he later laments, I'm getting too old for it.

Mercer decides he likes the younger Mr. Beckett's round, chipmunk-esque face. Damn it all. He tells Hans, Mr. Beckett looks not unlike a chipmunk. Hans laughs and puffs out his cheeks, ruffles his hair. He then struts about as he imagines rich and powerful men do.

'One day I'll be a lord,' the boy declares.

'Perhaps. Stranger things than that have happened.'

 

So, what does he dream of? The dead and the dead burying the dead. Sometimes John Church burying the terrier he had apparently owned as a boy and had once told Mercer about. But mostly faceless dead burying the faceless dead and water and fire and when he wakes he is thankful. Hans, with rapidly improving English, tells him he looks like shit. He doesn't disagree.

Christmas is around the corner. Times stretches itself out. Becomes thin, flat, forever and ever ongoing. He says, I need to visit my daughter. I need to see Lisette. For once I remembered her and bought her a present. But, maybe, she will be too old for it. Maybe not. If she is? Well, one of the many cousins will have it. He thinks of his daughter as he last saw her, a year or two ago. Has he been gone that long? A year and a half, almost two, away from England's shores. He does not know what he will say to her. He does not know how to speak to her. She, being this strange creature that looks a little like him but more like her mother, who is her own person and has her own thoughts. He cannot fathom how it happened that she was born. What can he say to her after two years?

'My you've grown' seems underwhelming.

He tells himself he will visit her in two days. It will give him time to think.

           

Two years from England's shore this time. It had been more, in years past. If you are gone from England more than present within the country can you really say you are English?

 

Mercer goes to church on Sunday. He hasn't been so regularly in a long time as there really isn't time for it during war. He sits at the back. He wonders if Church's body was buried in a mass grave. It probably was. He remembers country Christmas-tides with fire and dancing and more fire because it was the ending of the year, the death of a season, and all endings and all beginnings have one thing in common which is that they both start and end with fire and blood.

 

When Lisette wakes on Christmas eve morning it is to a dusting of snow and her cousins excitedly talking of the Thames freezing over. For if it does then they will be able to walk upon it and wouldn't that be just the thing? Although it is a holy day work does not cease and she and her cousins must tend to the geese and help Auntie Anne with the baking and only then can they go out to play.

'Be sure to bundle up,' Anne hollers as they tear through the house. 'I won't have any of you catching your death!'

'We shan't,' Lisette insists. She is having a too-long scarf wrapped around her by Mary. Tilly is attempting to put a coat on Jimmy who isn't having it.

'We'll be well, mam,' Mary says. 'And we'll come home should we begin to feel too cold. I promise.'

Anne gives her eldest a look that conveys her disbelief of the assertion but she lets them go with no more protests to their keeping warm understanding that such chiding falls upon deaf ears. The four scamper off into streets and scream at their friends to come with them to the river to see if they can walk upon it. A gang quickly forms and they disappear into byways towards muddy Thames.

'They've all grown since last I was here.'

Anne feels her heart jump at the sudden voice then it is calm. She turns on heel to face her brother who stands sheepish with hat in hand.

'I've brought gifts from the Continent,' he apologizes. 'Hans can put them on the table.'

She watches a toe-headed boy dump out a bag of wrapped goods. He looks no older than Tilly although more a rascal than even her brother had been at that age.

'It is good to see you, Joseph.'

Mercer nods. Remains standing, uncertain. Hans can feel the tension and disappears himself out back. They hear the clatter of his boots, indignant squawks of the poultry, then he is gone. A brief wonder of : Is that another child of Joe's? But no, she tells herself, the lad had nothing of Mercer in him. Clearly a bur that has hitched itself along for the moment. Joseph was always one for picking up strays.

'How is Lisette?' He asks.

'Well. She is well. Misses you.'

'She hardly knows me to miss me.'

Anne rolls her eyes. Whose fault is that, then? T'isn't Lisette's. Did you remember her present this time? He insists that he has. A book of French fairy tales. He thinks she will like it and hope she remembers enough of her mother's language to read it. He picked it up in Lisbon, how it came to be there is anyone's guess. It was in a bookshop owned by a recusant Jew named Ibrahim Jacobi. Italian. London is becoming like that, he says. He is speaking for Anne is silent and there needs to be words at such a time. 'With all and sundry from everywhere thrown together here and forced to make shift as best we can.'

'Will you come for supper tomorrow?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Come for supper.'

'I cannot for certain, Anne.'

'You will not avoid your daughter more than you already have. Come for supper. I will send Mary to find you if you do not. If it comes to it, I will send Richard as well.'

'How is he?'

'Well. Joe, we're all well. I got your letter. From Spain. You didn't seem well.'

'I was.' He smiles at her. 'We're all always well is our family.'

'How is your friend?'

'Church? Dead. He died. Two weeks after I left.'

She stands with her hands in her apron and she says that she is sorry and Mercer shrugs and does not look at her. Suddenly she must move and so she is pouring him ale and finding something for them to eat. Cheese and bread and some preserves from the autumn.

'Anne.' He stops. Starts. Looks at her for a long while. 'I missed thee.'

'I missed thee as well.'

'I have a letter for Lisette. I'll leave it for her.'

'Give it her thyself. Stay until they return, or give it her tomorrow.'            

He agrees and changes the subject to business, a language both brother and sister speak fluently. It is hours later that Anne waves him from the door and reminds him, again, that he is to sup with them on the morrow, for Christmas tide and on account of none of them having seen his ugly hide in two years. He laughs, short, 'I always knew thou loved me.'

'Don't push thy luck, Joe.'

'Shan't.' He bows with a mocking expression.

Returning to the hearth Anne arranges the presents on the table and sees two for Lisette. One, small and soft and the other clearly the book. It feels heavier than its appearance and she is careful as she sets it where her niece will see it. The room gathers a weight into it. A density. She stokes the fire and makes herself busy with her ledgers and tells herself that such fancies and dark thoughts will bring not but ill tidings and so she had best not pay mind to the heaviness in the room and the sudden flare of worry that lingers.


	8. Chapter 8

As it had been around ten years since the last Frost Faire of a scale worth commemorating with pamphlets and fetes Christmas-tide is spent by the children of London continue their investigation of the river with hopeful expressions. To this great cause Lisette and her cousins manage to finish chores early and beg the rest of the day off from their parents. Anne allows them a grace period of a few hours to tramp about London and make havoc. Her only requirement placed upon their behaviour is, No more satirical snowmen. 

‘But mam,’ Mary makes a face. ‘T’is only good fun!’ 

Anne turns her daughter about and fixes her hair up under her cap. ‘The last time you, Tilly, and Lisette were having ‘only a bit of good fun’ you painted a rude image of the queen on London bridge and I won’t be having it again this year.’

‘Weren’t us, mam!’

‘That’s what you say but there were witnesses. Now be a good lass and bring me Tilly and Lisette so I can make sure you three are at least clean and presentable.’ Mary obliges with a heavy sigh and a declaration that there is no fun ever allowed and didn’t grandda fight to bring back laughs? She calls her mother ‘a living Cromwell’ and manages to duck a bat to her head as she flees the room in search of her sister and cousin. 

It is only after the three girls are off upon their quest of walking on the hopefully-frozen river that Anne is able to sit down for fives minutes together and tend to the household accounts. Only halfway through her self-allotted duties there is the door opening and her brother is quiet in the hall, shuffling snow off boots and dusting his coat. 

‘Be happy I escaped,’ he says, ducking into the room and scooting across the table bench to be opposite Anne. ‘The Becketts never stop working. I was in this morning until Stanhope groused enough to annoy Elder Beckett into letting us leave for the day.’ 

‘A half-day is due you.’ 

‘Aye, but they won’t be taking theirs I can assure you.’ 

‘Even the son?’ 

‘He’s like his da’, though he wouldn’t have me saying as much.’ 

‘What a queer family.’ 

Mercer raises an eyebrow but refrains from giving comment, instead he asks for Lisette and is told that his daughter is off making London too hot to hold her and is probably, at this moment, making a rude snowman of the Lord Chancellor or, heaven help up, the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

‘Someone must,’ Mercer is philosophical. 

‘And that someone must be your daughter? Well, she will be back for dinner alongside Tilly and Mary and whomsoever they decide to bring back. Richard should be in soon as well.’ 

To Mercer this is already too many people to be fitting in a room together - to be exact, too many people he is related to that he therefore must make polite conversation with in a room together. Thankfully, for his sake, most of the attendees to his sister’s dinner are children. Tilly and Mary and baby James will hardly count, perhaps all three together, if stood atop each other’s shoulders and given a cloak and some more common sense, would make an adult. But as it stands, he does not expect much from them. 

When the time comes Anne shoos Lisette over to her father. 

‘I’m sure you have much to say to each other,’ she says. Mercer is dumbfounded by this assumption. What could he have to say to Lisette? Lisette seems much in the same mind as her father and so chews on her bread thoughtfully as her uncle Richard intones about the latest scandal in the neighbourhood. 

It is after the table is cleared and pipes brought out that Mercer asks how Lisette’s studies are going. Can you read, yet? Can you write?

Lisette goes for her horn-book and in the frosted windowpane demonstrates her letters and numbers. Her fours and nines look much the same and her ones and sevens do as well, if Mercer is of a mind to critique the attempt it is quelled by a sharp glance from Anne. 

‘They’re well formed,’ he says. Lisette is shy, suddenly, wipes the window with her sleeve. He pats her head and says that he had trouble when he was her age with minding his letters and numbers for they looked the same until this traveling preacher helped him to see their differences. And, he says, he knows a young boy her age for whom the letters cannot remain still and they dance upon the page before his eyes. 

‘Is it magic, papa?’ She asks. The thought mystifies her. She cannot imagine words not cooperating. 

‘No, it is only for some people they cannot read even if they wanted to, or rather, it is very difficult for them. Your uncle would ascribe it to the will of God.’ 

Lisette seats herself on the bench next to Mercer and watches him smoke for a long minute before saying, ‘if the word is God then why would He have it so people cannot read it?’ 

‘It’s a mystery. Surely He has a purpose for it.’ 

‘That is what Reverend Cooper says.’ 

‘Have you seen your presents yet?’ 

She shakes her head and then looks about the room with excitement. The last time her father returned from the Continent he had not been able to get her something for a reason she had not fully understood for he had said something about blocks and ships and chains and harbours. Her auntie had been worried. Her papa had said that it was all fine. 

Mercer sits himself back down, having retrieved the gifts which are in brown paper and she looks at the two and is excited. The first is a small toy monkey which can bend and hold onto objects. 

‘I saw a man in Gibraltar with a real monkey, like this. It were small and did tricks.’ 

Carefully, she attaches it to the edge of the bench and looks delicate as it holds to the edge. The next gift is unwrapped and the book of French fairy tales sits neatly in her lap. Lisette traces the faded letters and opens it with care. 

‘Do you remember any of your French?’ 

She shakes her head. She can remember the taste of the language, if languages can have tastes. The feel of her mother speaking it as she put her to sleep at night. There are songs she knows the tune to and thinks, for reasons she cannot fathom, that there are words but they are in French. Her auntie does not know the language and her papa is never around long enough to teach it her and even when he is around he seems loath to speak it. 

‘Well, we’ll fix that. Can’t have you not knowing it.’ 

‘Will you teach it me?’ 

He inclines his head. They will make a study of it, he says. Every day you must practice or else you shan’t master it. I will speak only French to you. 

‘But I won’t understand!’

‘In time you will.’ 

Her attention returns to the book. She turns more pages and admires the woodblock images and the careful colours that jump out to her. Red dresses, an orange tiger, emerald snake. There is a large, grey creature with a horn upon its nose. She wants to know if it is a unicorn. 

‘If it is, it is a very ugly one.’ 

‘I want to see a unicorn, papa. Have you ever seen one?’ 

‘No, I’ve not managed that.’ 

She looks through it more and then closes it and sets it aside. She says, ‘thank you, papa, for the gifts.’ 

He replies stiffly, ‘you’re welcome.’ 

Outside there is snow and Lisette plucks at her skirt and thinks about things to ask but cannot come up with anything at the moment. She swings her legs and watches as he pokes around in his pipe before setting it aside. Beside the fire are Tilly and Mary asleep against each other. Her uncle RIchard is reading the Bible and auntie Anne is feeding James. Lisette recalls a fire from when her mam had still been alive. All she can remember is that it had been very big, so big they had to be across the river from it which makes little sense now that she thinks on it. Even if it had been a bonfire, it wouldn’t have been so large as to necessitate their being that far away from it. She thinks maybe she could lean against her papa the way Tilly and Mary are slouched against uncle RIchard but then reasons that he probably would not like it much. She has never seen him hug anyone, or touch anyone at all, really. Which is terribly odd but her papa is a terribly odd man. She wonders if her mam had been terribly odd as well. With these thoughts she drifts off to sleep and slumps awkwardly against the wall. Mercer looks down at her, gets up and gently moves her to the floor with her cousins. 

‘I’d best go,’ he says to Anne. 

‘There’s no need.’

‘It’s a long walk.’ 

Anne knows the resolution in her brother’s voice and so he parts without more pressing from her. Richard sees him to the door, says it was good to have him around again, that he should come against Sunday-next, for church and a meal. 

‘I’ll see.’ 

‘Sure,’ Richard nods. ‘You’re always welcome.’ 

Donning hat and cloak and scarf Mercer returns to the winter streets and takes the long way back to his room and admires the small bits of frozen Thames, the mischief of children out after-hours, and searches out a magnificent snow-sculpture of the Archbishop of Canterbury with a tremendously small cock. Someone had urinated against the side of it and made an attempt to sign their initials. 

‘You’re out late.’ Hans appears from shadows. 

‘Was any of this your doing?’ 

‘No, sir, but I’ve heard the guv’ ‘ere is a right cunt.’ 

‘Not even the prick?’ 

‘I wish, sir! But no, I were too busy making a fine figure of Mr. Beckett.’ 

‘Good lord preserve us. Which one?’

‘The twat. The wee Cutler with his ugly pinched face.’ 

Mercer sighs, rubs his nose. Show me the way, he says. I need to see this. Hans excitedly leads him over to Leadenhall and at the head of the street he sees the snowman. Someone has given it a hat with a large, fine white feather. 

‘Should I knock his head off? So’s we don’t get done fer it?’ 

‘No, no leave it. I like it. His face is rather pinched, is it not?’ 

‘Ugly skunner.’ 

‘Come on, you rascal. To bed, to bed. We have work tomorrow with that ugly skunner.’

Hans whoops and hollers in the empty streets as they troop back to Mercer’s rooms. The boy likes the way his voice sounds as it refracts against ice, cold stone, empty corridors of alleys and byways. Nearing home Mercer bids him hush or else the landlady will wake and Mrs. Bly should only be woken under the scarcest of circumstances, and only if there is fire or flood. 

‘She’s a dragon,’ Mercer says as he finds blankets for Hans to curl up in on the floor. ‘I wouldn’t put breathing fire past her.’ 

‘I don’t like that,’ Hans says. 

‘Did you know your father or mother?’

‘No, sir, am a bastard I am. But it’s all right, I don’t think I’d have liked them much. Did you see your daughter?’

‘I did.’ 

‘Were she grown like you thought?’ 

‘She was.’ 

‘Is she like you?’

He does not know the answer to this and so says nothing. At some point Hans nods off and Mercer can hear his occasional snores which, despite their lack of timing, are soothing in their way. He falls asleep and dreams of an ocean full of words. He wakes, cursing the dratted poet who said something about  _ words, words, words _ . 

  
  


 

Passing each other in the office after the new year Beckett finds himself becoming increasingly aware of the other. More than the lad at his heels and the way he writes, which is left-handed and so seems awkward to Cutler, and yet he fastens latches, locks doors, opens books, and fixes his hat with his right, and more than all of that and exactly the colour of his hair which is Thames muddy brown but sometimes Cutler can see a bit of blond in it and more than the colour of his eyes which are also Thames muddy brown but in the right light there is green. Flecks of it. 

He sees the books Mercer keeps on his desk that are not dictionaries and language reference manuals - they are all natural philosophy and geography and occasionally something about theology. Beckett would not pin the translator as a religious figure, but the quiet perusal of reformist literature speaks overwise. But then there is the knowledge of Mass and saints which speaks to his being a papist. Would a papist read a reform pamphlet? Beckett doesn’t know. 

In this confused state he goes to George, ‘would a papist read a reform pamphlet?’ 

‘Know thy enemy,’ George intones. They are their club and playing cards but it’s more for the physical activity of moving objects about on a dreary, sleet-ridden night than for the sake of a game. ‘Why do you ask?’ 

‘Do you think Mister Mercer is a papist?’ 

‘Maybe? Would your father hire a papist? I cannot think he would.’ 

This gives Beckett pause as well. He cannot think that the elder Beckett would go to such a length as to hire a Catholic but then Mercer had been on the Continent for several years and in New France before that so he cannot discount conversion. 

‘Do you think him a religious man?’ Beckett asks. 

‘Lord I have no idea, Cutler. I confess to not having thought about him much. Damn good translator I’ll give him that. So I suppose, even if he is into popery, at least he knows his Dutch and his Hindi damn’d well.’ 

‘Cor, perhaps he’s a spy.’ 

‘Now you’re being ridiculous, man!’

‘He spied for Hesse. Riddle me this, George, how does a man from nothing in Manchester, the greatest mere village in the north, become so well educated as to keep Vesalius, Ray, and Newton on hand? He is more than just a mercenary turned clerk.’ 

George has no answer and insists they either play seriously or give up the pursuit of cards entirely for the evening. Beckett wonders if Mercer is any good at cards. He can tell that he is in no mood for company and so begs off for the evening. He pats George’s shoulder, I’ll see you tomorrow, eh. Give my regards to Sicily and tell Sprat, should you see him, that he owes me ten shillings on the horses. George is happy to pass along the messages and settles into the chair with an evening paper and a scotch. 

At home Beckett pokes his head into the library, sees his father behind a book. The elder Beckett lowers it and regards his son. 

‘You’re home early. I hadn’t expected to hear you come in for another few hours yet.’ 

‘I wasn’t in the mood for the company at the club tonight.’ 

‘You haven’t been for the past se’en night.’ 

Cutler leans against the door frame, reaches up and pulls his off leaving a thin dusting of day-old powder behind. He shrugs in response to his father’s query. 

‘You’re growing up,’ William says. There is some pride in the statement. Beckett shifts his weight. He does not know how to bear his father’s pride. ‘There is no sin in putting away childish things. Quite the opposite, in fact.’ 

‘ And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.’

William smiles, closes his volume and motions for Cutler to sit opposite him. 

‘Your friend, Mister Stanhope, he isn’t in any trouble is he?’ 

This is not what Cutler expected to be asked. He shakes his head. No, no, not to his knowledge. He’s been sober since returning from the countryside all those months ago. He is reasonable in his wine consumption at dinner and only has a glass or two after, like any normal gentleman. I have not seen him under a stable singing a rude soldier song, he thinks, in two to three months. That is a victory. 

‘Why? Have you heard something?’ 

‘Oh nothing much. Just something about a girl that he had known last summer. Did he break a marriage contract?’ 

‘No, father. There was a flirtation I will own, but nothing more than George’s usual. Which is to say he was forward but nothing untoward. Nothing that could be construed as intent to marry. Do we know the girl?’ 

‘No, her name has not been mentioned.’ 

‘Lucky for her.’ 

‘Indeed. Speaking of marriage, Cutler, oh I see your face. I know you are not keen at the moment but it ought not to be put off too much longer. Start a family young, while you are still active, that is my advice. What about Miss Stanhope? Her brother is a wastrel but she seems like an intelligent, steady sort of woman.’ 

‘She’s blonde.’

William laughs, Is that a complaint Cutler? Do you not like blonde hair? You’re a queer sort of lad. Always have been. Very well, we will find you a black haired beauty. 

‘Couldn’t abide black hair either.’ 

‘Ha! Now you’re being ridiculous on purpose. Brown hair? A brunette? Do you have a fancy?’ 

‘I’ve no fancy, father. Brown hair is sensible, is it not? If I am to marry I should hope it would be to an imminently sensible woman.’ 

‘Perhaps,’ William is laughing with his eyes. A sight Cutler has not seen since he was a boy and again, he feels shy. Uncertain with this sudden ease between him and his father. It came on without warning. He knows it could leave just as quickly. These moments are fleeting. He does not know if he cherishes them, just yet. ‘Still, I maintain that Miss Stanhope is a good option for you. You’ve both known each other for many years, her family has money, she is steady and sound and has all the sense her brother lacks.’ 

Cutler recalls the month out of London with the Stanhopes. He has mind to mention it to his father then amends the resolution. It would only create a hope where no hope should be made. 

‘I’ll think on it, father,’ he says, standing. ‘But as I am not scheduled to marry in the next three to six months I would not hold my breath were I you.’ 

William nods, returns to his book and says that this was pleasant. This was nice. His voice is soft, ‘I had missed speaking with you, Cutler.’ 

Cutler, by the door, ‘I know, father.’ 

‘I feel that we do not know each other anymore.’ 

‘We don’t.’ 

‘You went away to university and now you are a young man I do not know.’ 

‘I am.’ In a moment of rash generosity Cutler adds, ‘but that does not mean we cannot know each other again. I think, it is only, I came to know myself better upon returning from Oxford and that I had not known myself at all, before.’ 

‘You think little of me?’

Oh, how can a father ask a son that? Cutler wants to say, I did, and recently to, but I am changing and slowly, I think, I am coming to understand you better. 

‘No, father, it is only I do not think we speak the same languages.’

  
  


 

January. The dark of winter is mending itself, although you cannot see it yet. In her room Katherine Haywood counts letters. Letters she has sent every week to George Stanhope that return unopened. One, and only one mind, came with a note from him included and that note had been simple:  _ Please, I beg of you, Miss Haywood, stop writing to me. I have given you money and if you need more I will aid you but these letters need to stop. You will ruin me should they be found. _

There had been a little more but it was to the same effect. Katherine keeps it folded up and hidden in a special statue upon her mantel piece. It is a shepherdess in a blue dress with a blue veil and pricked upon the veil are stars in gold. 

Sometimes, she is still sore. She does not know if it is real or a phantom of her imagination for she has had several doctors and apothecaries attend to her and none have been able to comprehend her ailment. They put it down to her womanly complaints. They proscribe tea to soothe her. It does not do its office. 

Every week since that evening she has written to George Stanhope. It is a bundle of twelve letters and will soon be thirteen. Sand dusted across her current letter to set the ink. She hates him. She loves him. She hardly knows him. She feels very alone and writing to him is the only rope to the outside world she has. Her parents worry for her. Their ill daughter with the mysterious complaint and a sudden, melancholic turn when that had never been her natural disposition. 

At night she dreams of a wolf. Her stomach is a wolf and her pelvis is a wolf and her thighs are filled with teeth and they will nash away at anything that comes near her so there is red everywhere. It is worse when her menstruation begins because then there is actually red and she wakes up and believes it is happening all over again. When her flow returned to her, late December, a parting gift of 1704 as she enters 1705, she had screamed. Screamed and wept in her mother’s arms and could not explain why this suddenly causes such deep seated panic. She wishes she could dash out her belly and become as sexless as the Virgin Mary. 

‘I wish I were a nun,’ she says to the empty room and the sand-dusted letter. ‘Then I would be untouchable and I would wear white and be filled with light.’ 

In baths she scrubs herself raw. She does not know why. 

She writes as January becomes February. No reply. Only returned letters. Eventually, even that stops. 

Mid-February and she is in the garden with the thin layer of remaining snow and the crunch of shoes on ice makes her turn around. She had been contemplating the dead trees and thinking that the inside of herself must look like that for she would never be pretty again. 

Sicily stands all in blue. A bundle is in her hand. The unreturned letters, Katherine thinks. She is going to open them up and read them to me and make me listen to my own words mock me. Katherine blinks, shudders. 

‘Why are you hear?’ She asks, her voice a whisper. 

‘I’ve come to deliver my letters. I had thought to send them, but as they are in chronological order I decided it would be best to give them to you by hand.’ 

Sicily, all in blue, with stars pricked into her shawl around her neck that covers her hair underneath her winter cloak, stands in the snow holding out letters. Katherine lets out a noise that had hidden itself in the back of her throat. Not a whine but not-not a whine. 

Sicily moves forward, takes Katherine’s hand, presses the letters into them. 

‘I wrote back for each letter George never answered. I should have attended to you afterwards but I thought you would not want to see me.’ 

‘I didn’t.’ 

‘Do you want these? I do not have to leave them with you.’ 

Katherine looks down at the letters. She is tempted to throw them back at Sicily. To shred them, burn them in front of her. Point to the ashes and say, See this is what I think of you and yours. But, then, Katherine reasons that this is the first time she has had contact with another person outside of her family in three months. Is that not a good thing? 

Where are my friends? She wonders, madly. Where have they been all this while? Oh yes, I sent them away then they stopped coming altogether. 

It’s only been three months. 

‘I’ll take them,’ Katherine replies. ‘But I cannot promise to read them.’ 

‘I would not ask you to.’ 

‘I hate your brother.’ 

‘That makes sense.’ 

‘I hate you, as well.’ 

‘That also makes sense.’ 

Katherine admires the woman with her cool, distant expression. Her beautiful removal. 

‘Do you know what it’s like to feel so alone?’ Katherine asks. She does not know why. It is very cold out, and her hands are red because of it. That dread colour that never leaves her life. 

‘Yes.’ 

‘Good.’ She turns, taking the letters she walks back into the house and leaves the woman in blue in the snow. 

  
  
  
  


Spring comes late but once it does the entirety of London is a dripping mess. Through muddy streets of defrosting refuse Beckett stomps until he gets to Nicholas’, composes himself, and strides in the door and into a faceful of a a pamphlet and Sprat’s fist. At first he does not understand why Sprat is leering at him then he understands all too clearly. He hisses a curse, jams his hat back on his head and spins back out the door. 

‘George,’ he bangs back into Company offices. ‘George where the bleeding hell are you?’ 

George raises his head from the desk where it had been resting. He winces at the noise Beckett makes upon entering. ‘Lord, Cutler, you’re like a fury. Be a good man and keep it down. I’m poorly today. I think I might have a cough, or will soon.’ 

‘What is this? I thought this was over. I told my father you had nothing to hide.’  

‘Christ Cutler, I cannot read the scandal rag when it’s shoved entirely too close to my face.’’ 

From his desk Mercer looks up and watches the confrontation. The young Beckett, Hans’ ‘right skunner’, stands domineering and attempting to be taller than he is. George Stanhope is a miserable heap of a dripping nose and a hoarse voice. 

Beckett’s voice drops to a hiss, ‘she printed it.’ 

George blinked. The broadsheet is waved in his face. 

‘She printed it,’ Beckett repeats. 

‘Who, Cutler?’

‘Your bit of skirt. Your little Miss Waywood. The little thing printed your adventure and has spun in  _ such _ a way.’ 

George’s face changes, he reels back and snaps the paper from Beckett’s hands. He reads the headlines then reads it again. No, he gasps. He pauses, rereads it again. ‘All right, I mean I wouldn’t say she spun it. I might have been a bit, ah, liberal with my promises.’ 

Beckett makes a face and flops into a chair. ‘Get this cleared up,’ he says jabbing a finger in George’s direction. ‘Father will be furious if you attach scandal to the Company. Christ’s blood we have enough already.’ 

‘How’d you find this?’

‘Sprat shoved it in my face.’ 

‘Disgusting.’ 

‘He is.’ 

‘Can’t stand the man.’ 

‘It’s his wife I feel sorry for.’ 

‘You and me both, Cutler. I’ve met her. How he managed to get her into bed is a mystery.’ 

‘Nevermind that, what you are doing about your Miss Haywood.’ 

George groans and leans back. He laments that he ought to have just married her. It would have been a scandal but at least everyone’s honour would be intact instead of this. No one’s names are mentioned, to be sure, but everyone will know it’s me. 

Beckett listens with half an ear and turns his attention to Mercer who is watching them with that blank expression of his that drives Beckett mad. 

‘What?’ He snaps at the older man. 

‘Nothing, sir.’ Mercer’s eyes drop back to his work. George continues to complain. Beckett looks up to the stained ceiling and the cracking crenelations. This hulking beast of a building slowly falling down around them. He can feel Mercer’s eyes on the back of his neck again. He wishes the man wouldn’t stare so. It disconcerts him. Unnerves him. Turning, he stares back. Their eyes meet and Beckett is determined to hold the man’s gaze. 

George, oblivious to the stand-off, moves on to complaining about life as a whole. 

A thought occurs to Beckett and he stands, goes to Mercer’s desk and perches on the edge of it. Mercer sits back and looks up at him. A minute and he removes his glasses. 

‘How’d you afford those, I wonder.’ Beckett says in a low, conversational voice. 

‘This and that.’ 

‘You spied for Hesse.’ 

Mercer acknowledges this. Beckett admires his profile and thinks that the sharp edges of nose and chin are pleasant. Ugly as sin, Beckett thinks, but he has a nice profile. 

‘You solve problems.’ 

Mercer also acknowledges this. 

‘You could be more communicative,’ Beckett hisses. George continues his complaints sotto voce to them but they are not listening. This does not deter George. ‘I want you to look into this.’ 

‘Into what, sir?’ 

‘Find out who is printing the dirt on George and Miss Haywood and make sure they stop. I’ll compensate you accordingly.’ 

Mercer turns the offer over in his head and on the face of it he agrees. But, he says, I want details before I start. And half the agreed price before then half at completion. 

‘Fine,’ Beckett nods. ‘Come over, tonight, around eight or nine. I’ll be in the library. Father has meetings all this evening so he will be out late and no one else is around to disturb.’ 

This is agreed to and Mercer watches as Beckett crosses back to George and snatches the broadsheet from his hands. He looks at it again with disgust, moves to throw it in the fire then reconsiders. With a glance towards Mercer, catching the man’s eye, he tucks it away with his other papers and seats himself with a great dramatic flourish. 

‘Come, gentlemen,’ he snaps. ‘The day is not stopping for us and we have work to do before I have to explain Company decisions to parliament.’ 

‘A joy, I am sure.’ 

Beckett blinks at Mercer. Then he smirks. 

‘It is and since you have time to give attitude, Mister Mercer, you will accompany me. I need someone to take notes.’ 

‘Sir, no offence, but take your own notes.’ 

‘I do,’ Beckett schools his features so they are all ease and without awkwardness. He cannot tell if he is successful. ‘I want to be able to cross reference them, though. The New Company has been attempting to eat us alive and with the Surat captivity incident in an ingoing state of dissatisfaction for all parties involved, Parliament is concerned. So you will come with me and take notes. I would say to take it up with my father if you are dissatisfied but as he is out of the office for today you will have to abide by my imperialism.’ 

‘I would never think to complain, sir.’ 

Beckett glares, wonders at his madness for his brief infatuation (if he may be so bold as to call it that) with the infuriating man. Who is this nobody to give him cheek? To have such attitude? But, thinking that it would be best to emulate his father in this moment, he allows the comment to slide off him. 

They work in silence until George declares that life is too much trouble and bangs off for a drink. 


End file.
